Gain Access To My Mother's House & Sido Compiled By Colette Presented In Kindle
A mediocre read. I read Colettes Cherie years ago and enjoyed it, This one, not so much, Tis a collection of two memoirs focusing on her mother, Sido, The narrative is nonlinear, confusing and limiting,
.
My Mothers House and Sido by Colette
,
Colette narrates the tale of her volatile and emotionally unstable childhood, She worships her mother, a woman who is distant, cold and unloving, Her siblings are often in conflict but mainly they try to go through the years together, The family is quite poor but her mother attempts to present a decent facade, Her father is often an absent shadow, a man who was talentless and financially parasitic, He is clingy and needy, He does not seem to care much for the children,
.
The book does make me wonder, When authors narrate their memoir, they are presenting to us their version of the story, I wonder how true Colettes version is, I believe she exaggerates her mothers wonderful qualities, I believe she romanticises her challenging early years, Hence, the emotion that rings throughout the pages is frantic and all over the place, There are hints of abandonment, codependency and isolation, The family is deeply unhappy but has no other options but to soldier on,
.
I am beginning to wonder if this is a French thing, Perhaps I dont really get the French style of writing, It is poetic but seems to be going nowhere, But anyways, if you are into French literature, do check this out,
. Colettes life was an abundance of verve, She pushed through every door,
She infused her characters and her stories with verve, Colettes characters are alive.
This is oldfashioned fiction, the kind that invites the reader to snuggle a bit deeper under the old warm quilt and keep reading
Its a pleasure to read My Mothers House and Sido.
Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
sitelinkwww, richardsubber. com Even if you only read a vignette or two from this book, it's worthwhile, Colette's recollections of her childhood, and her parents in particular, is amazingly rich, both in style and emotional substance, sometimes all you need is bucolicaI think this book is somehow connected to Colettes “Claudine” books but the characters name throughout this one is Colette, and even though its sometimes translated as “Claudines House” I am not sure or aware of the reason behind this.
This novel is most definitely a kind of roman a clef or nonfiction novel and was written several years after the Claudine novels that I will read later, and most definitely has the voice of an older and more experienced writer.
The novel is about the youngest of many children to a rural French family, The setting of this novel is right at the time that the older children are beginning to leave home and the pressures, tensions, and sadness that creates in the youngest child not only as she begins to lose her mentors and playmates, but also as this shifts the dynamic with her parents.
This novel is sad and wistful, but its also quite funny and energetic and full of the weird kinds of stories that stick with a person for a long time even after the specific everyday memories of childhood pass by.
If it were the case that Colette started with the very specific memory of feelings and then created the narrative supports those, I would not be surprised.
This reminds me a lot of Jessica Mitfords “Hons and Rebels” and even my own childhood, because I was also the youngest,
This very short novel is the immediate follow up to My Mothers House, Its important to look at titles here, The previous was called my mothers house, and while thats a transliteration of the title, it does speak to an important kind of distinction, This was not “her” house in that sense and it was not her fathers house, but her mothers, This novel is called Sido, a shortened version of Sidonie, her mothers name, but also her name, So these connections show us a lot about the kinds of distance and connection between Colette the writer, Claudine/Colette the character, and the narrative being told.
In this novel, we follow Colette back to her mothers house now as an adult revisiting that childhood, not an adult narrator but the adult character.
Colette finds her mother much smaller, much more human, and finds her father even less imposing than the almost nonentity imposition he was during her childhood.
So when he dies, even in those moment his presence is barely felt,
This novel is much much more concerned with the nature of specific memories, probably because our character is much closer in time, And as a sequel, it doesnt so much as add to the narrative, so much as add a narrative lens through which to view the original.
An odd connection for me is that this novel reminds me of Joseph Roths brilliant elegy to the AustroHungarian empire The Radetsky March, and then completely buried it in a somber followup, The Emperors Tomb.
Each chapter is a story about the author's childhood, As a whole, the book reads as a tender tribute to her mother, It paints a detailed, and sparklingly entertaining picture of life in the French countryside while also highlighting the important strength of women in the countryside, A happy book to read, Tender, enjoyable, and loving. I loved this book! It's a collection of memories, musings, and descriptions of the author's childhood home in a small French village, The writing was lovely and made the far off time and place of someone else's life seem immediate and tangible in the way only the best writing does.
I have never read anything by Colette before, but I will definitely be seeking out some more of her books, I only wish this one had been longer! This is one of my all time favorite books, I rarely reread a book, but I have read this book many times, This is writing that Colette did for herself, unlike Cheri and other books that she wrote at her husband's request, This is a personal memior as seen through her eyes as a child, Magical stuff! Reading this one in the bathroom, . . when I'm not reading something for school, . . have been reading for the
last few months, I think its going to take me a few more to finish, Each story in the book is like a little gem, so its nice to take it slow, Some books, like The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death and Pippi in the South Seas, appeal to my childlike love of mischief and weirdos.
My Mother's House amp Sido took me to a different place from my childhood, completely dreamy, sensual and romantic, I loved Colette's love for the provinces, with their basketfulls of suckling kittens, hyacinths and foxgloves, and melted chocolate for breakfast, I loved her strange siblings who read books in trees and made up epitaphs for fun, And then there is her mother, the mesmerizing and seductive "Sidonie," who seems a little like the TarotEmpress with her uncanny intuition about all things natural and living.
Of course, this is chockfull of great, melancholy quotes about the relationship between mothers amp daughters:
"At the mere sight of her mother's hand the Little One starts to her feet, pale, gentle now, trembling slightly as a child must who for the first time ceases to be the happy little vampire that unconsciously drains the maternal heart.I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir, especially Colette's lush and sensual descriptions of the rural village inth century France where she grew up under the care of her unconventional and fascinating mother Sido and her father, the Captain, who was passionately in love with Sido his nickname for his wife Sidonie.
. . the warm sittingroom with its flora of cut branches and its fauna of peaceful creatures the echoing house, dry, warm and crackling as a newlybaked loaf the garden, the village.
. . Beyond these all is danger, all is loneliness, "
When I picked this book up, I was already reading another novel, but I figured I could read both at one time since "My Mother's House" reads like a collection of vignettes that would be easy to put down often.
How wrong I was! I couldn't put this one down because I didn't want to leave Colette's beautiful childhood world where hearty peasants drink wine out of tin pails used for milking cows, and they fiddle in the moonlight and dance the quadrille under canopies of honeysuckle.
I can still smell the sage, freshly cut grass, harvested tomatoes and aubergines, and the bricks of homemade chocolate left out to dry in the summer night stalked by feral cats who stamp paw prints like mysterious flowers on them with the turn of each page.
Last week, I read Colette's "The Ripening Seed," but I didn't like it at all, Now I'm glad I gave her writing another chance, Because of "My Mother's House amp Sido," I will enjoy reading other works by her, I read this or Earthly Paradise every fall, Somehow it seems like the right time to fall into Colette's meditations on childhood and family and tramping through gardens and over fences into fields, Two novellas written seven years apart, Both composed of short chapters/vignettes where Colettein her's or'swrites about her mother Sido, her father her mother's second husband, the exsoldier with one of his legs amputated, her mother's first husband and her three siblings, all of them dead already except one brother.
Every family has its own story and I am sure that given the same talent for writing as that of Colette each of these stories can be as interesting as these novellas.
But life is not fair, Not everyone can write well, or have the patience and energy for it, and unless a family history catches the eye of someone who would be interested to write about it for money or fame, then even its most interesting times, or its happiest days, can attach themselves to no surviving memory and would be like as if they didn't happen at all.
But having a Colette in the family is like having a deathless raconteur who shall keep your family alive for as long as there are human beings who read or listen.
These novelettish biographies were published around the's so even without me googling it, I am sure Colette and his then still living brother had long both passed away too.
Yet here they, and the rest of the family, are as alive as the person next to you, How common is it, for example, for us to have had mothers who were fulltime housewives, had grown old doing mostly nothing but housework, and still thought of their family and household concerns up to their dying days Yet only a Colette can write about a mother like that her own with a memorably bittersweet nostalgia like this her mother alreadyyears old at the time, a widow, with various illnesses:
"At five o'clock in the morning I would be awakened by the clank of a full bucket being set down in the kitchen sink immediately opposite my room.
"'What are you doing with that bucket, mother Couldn't you wait until Josephine the househelp arrives'
"And out I hurried, But the fire was already blazing, fed with dry wood, The milk was boiling on the bluetiled charcoal stove, Nearby, a bar of chocolate was melting in a little water for my breakfast, and, seated squarely in her cane armchair, my mother was grinding the fragrant coffee which she roasted herself.
The morning hours were always kind to her, She wore their rosy colours in her cheeks, Flushed with a brief return to health, she would gaze at the rising sun, while the church bell rang for early Mass, and rejoice at having tasted, while we still slept, so many forbidden fruits.
"The forbidden fruits were the overheavy bucket drawn up from the well, the firewood split with a billhook on an oaken block, the spade, the mattock, and above all the double steps propped against the gablewindows of the attic, the flowery spikes of the tootall lilacs, the dizzy cat that had to be rescued from the ridge of the roof.
All the accomplices of her old existence as a plump and sturdy little woman, all the minor rustic divinities who once obeyed her and made her so proud of doing without servants, now assumed the appearance and position of adversaries.
But they reckoned without that love of combat which my mother was to keep till the end of her life, At seventyone dawn still found her undaunted, if not always undamaged, Burnt by fire, cut with the pruning knife, soaked by melting snow or spilt water, she had always managed to enjoy her best moments of independence before the earliest risers had opened their shutters.
She was able to tell us of the cats' awakening, of what was going on in the nests, of news gleaned, together with the morning's milk and the warm loaf, from the milkmaid and the baker's girl, the record in fact of the birth of a new day.
"It was not until one morning when I found the kitchen unwarmed and the blue enamel saucepan hanging on the wall, that I felt my mother's end to be near.
Her illness knew many respites, during which the fire flared up again on the hearth, and the smell of fresh bread and melting chocolate stole under the door together with the cat's impatient paw.
These respites were periods of unexpected alarms, My mother and the big walnut cupboard were discovered together in a heap at the foot of the stairs, she having determined to transport it in secret from the upper landing to the ground floor.
Whereupon my elder brother insisted that my mother should keep still and that an old servant should sleep in the little house, But how could an old servant prevail against a vital energy so youthful and mischievous that it contrived to tempt and lead astray a body already half fettered by death My brother, returning before sunrise from attending a distant patient, one day caught my mother redhanded in the most wanton of crimes.
Dressed in her nightgown, but wearing heavy gardening sabots, her little grey septuagenarian's plait of hair turning up like a scorpion's tail on the nape of her neck, one foot firmly planted on the crosspiece of the beech trestle, her back bent in the attitude of the expert jobber, my mother, rejuvenated by an indescribable expression of guilty enjoyment, in defiance of all her promises and of the freezing morning dew, was sawing logs in her own yard.
"
Think: apart from literature, wher one writes from the heart, which magical thing here on earth can make a brief, solitary dawn in a forgotten place on a forgotten day, eternal like this.