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"Gigi", Colette
24 March 2023 12:01 amhttps://www.ebooksgratuits.com/html/colette_gigi.html
My immediate reaction to this was that, as a short story, it felt like about half of a book with a chunk missing :( If the author had written the whole thing out with the same level of detail that she devotes to the initial set-up, then it would have been twice as long and probably a novel in its own right. But she spends a lot of time depicting her characters and their situation at the start, and then the dènouement feels suddenly stuck in out of nowhere, in a handful of scenes that feel disjointed with no clear progression between them. There didn't seem to be any stage of development or change from the initial relationship.
Perhaps this was because I was reading in French at about three am and thus not sensitive to all Colette's subtleties; there was certainly a large chunk of vocabulary at the start that was simply unfamiliar. (Mme Alvarez toisa sa petite-fille, du canotier en feutre orné d’une plume-couteau, jusqu’aux souliers molière de confection -- I'm assuming from context that this is describing Gigi's clothing, but without looking up all the period vocabulary I have no idea what it means, and have only learned that toiser means to look at somebody because I *did* have to look that up at a later point where it was plot-significant!) But Gaston seems to switch from viewing Gigi as a refreshingly unaffected child to viewing her as a potential mistress to acting the despairing lover without any obvious trigger or transition at all: there isn't any "But without your glasses you're beautiful, Miss Jones!" moment, or even any point where we see it visibly dawn on him for the first time that she has become an adult.( Read more... )
My immediate reaction to this was that, as a short story, it felt like about half of a book with a chunk missing :( If the author had written the whole thing out with the same level of detail that she devotes to the initial set-up, then it would have been twice as long and probably a novel in its own right. But she spends a lot of time depicting her characters and their situation at the start, and then the dènouement feels suddenly stuck in out of nowhere, in a handful of scenes that feel disjointed with no clear progression between them. There didn't seem to be any stage of development or change from the initial relationship.
Perhaps this was because I was reading in French at about three am and thus not sensitive to all Colette's subtleties; there was certainly a large chunk of vocabulary at the start that was simply unfamiliar. (Mme Alvarez toisa sa petite-fille, du canotier en feutre orné d’une plume-couteau, jusqu’aux souliers molière de confection -- I'm assuming from context that this is describing Gigi's clothing, but without looking up all the period vocabulary I have no idea what it means, and have only learned that toiser means to look at somebody because I *did* have to look that up at a later point where it was plot-significant!) But Gaston seems to switch from viewing Gigi as a refreshingly unaffected child to viewing her as a potential mistress to acting the despairing lover without any obvious trigger or transition at all: there isn't any "But without your glasses you're beautiful, Miss Jones!" moment, or even any point where we see it visibly dawn on him for the first time that she has become an adult.( Read more... )