The love and passion between a woman who is almost 50 and a boy who is not even 25

More than a hundred years have passed since the publication of this little wonder called Chéri (1920) and, as if it were a watch built by Switzerland's most competent professional, there's nothing that doesn't work: the provocation, the sensuality, the irony, the mordacity, the intelligence, the social criticism, and the psychological depth that the great Colette (1873-1954) was capable of. The book holds up not only because the story of love and passion between a woman approaching fifty and the son of one of her friends, who is not even twenty-five, is still unconventional. It holds up, above all, because of the French writer's abilities: the natural perfection of the dialogues, the subtlety of each gesture of the characters, the acute sense of reality demonstrated by each of the observations made by the narrative voice, and the progression of events, which is studied to the millimeter and leaves out of the frame crucial moments of the, or more than just the, lovers' unbridled love.

It's one of the great novels about sensuality: as if the writing had been infected by the passion between young Chéri and Madame Léa, the precise and precious images that Colette constructed on each page allow readers to live inside the chambers filled with ladies in mushroom or Belle Époque silk, wondering who the old woman with her neck in disgrace was, looking back at them from the other side of the mirror. Teresa Florit's careful translation must have something to do with it. And there's also a dark side to all these fireworks: alongside the banquets, the Pommery and the jewels, alongside the more intimate bedroom scenes, there are descriptions of the fear of loneliness or aging that both move and darken a story that refuses to be merely one-colored. And then there's the humor, the laughter that bursts forth without warning: Colette, armed with a razor-sharp and merciless wit, could be more cruel in a single character introduction sentence than ten authors writing three-hundred-page treatises: "Seventy years old and with the corpulence of an encotyle eunuch... scandalously so."

We mustn't forget that Colette lived in the first half of the 20th century, that she was one of the first women to put words to concepts and feelings that hadn't been expressed before her, like the kind of intelligence that has so much to do with common sense and that the protagonist displays when she realizes: a story like this, written, from the first word to the last, from a woman's point of view. After her, the list of writers who admired her is long, and ranges from contemporary Katherine Mansfield until Maria-Mercè Marçal who, in a prologue he dedicated to her, saw in her a look "half cat, half fox": the dark, nocturnal look of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.