Colette's Renee Nere is complex, her name alone tells us that (the last name is the first name spelled backwards, not to mentioned that Renee means "reborn"). This female protagonist would certainly fit in with the modern notion of being female, and in the early 20th century, this was not only rare, but not very-well understood. I adore this book because of the way it encourages women (by example) to carve out their own existence and not to rely upon men for security. It is also wonderfully written. However, you'll be in for a shocker if you read the sequel, "The Shackle".

Gigi may be the best known of her works, but 'The Vagabond' stands out in pure beauty from the rest. The plot (an actress on the stage who faces public scorn and problems in love) seems to be most autobiographical, and narrator and main character, Renee Nere, is a delight. Both beautiful and painful in spots, this book deserves to be read, as well as its sequel, 'The Shackle.'

When I was a freshman in high school, I was asked to recite a poem in front of my class. I hadn't ever read poetry before and wandered the rows of poetry in my school's library aimlessly. I came upon a tiny book titled I Became Alone and picked it up. Its title immediately caught my attention. I saw it was a collection of 5 women poets I hadn't ever heard of. I chose it, following my instincts. That evening, I sat down and read the entire book. It was so good and full of excellent poems. Now, five years later, I have finally found it again here at amazon.com. I cannot wait to read it again; hopefully, they can find it for me. I highly recommend purchasing this book. You will never own a more satisfying work of poetry.

Who gives a ding-dong if Avedon is mining his archives for book material. This stuff is great and I like the way it has been put together. It's a fun, loose design balanced by elegantly composed and seen photographs. Most of his books have been very clean from start to finish. That wouldn't be good for this project.
This work is wet and playful without losing all the good stuff. It's a fresh jelly donut with the perfect ratio of jelly to donut. At no point during the experience does it fall apart and there is goodness in every page. (...)

I saw "Out of Africa" in Copenhagen in 1986 when I was 21 and bought the biography in Danish, but I couldn't get into it at the time, and eventually sold it to a used book store. Then two years ago I came across it (in English) in a used book store here in Southern California, read it and adored it. It's one of the few books I have read more than once.

I love the movie as well, bought it on video about a year ago and have watched it many times. Yes, Redford is not a Dennis F.Hatton type but he's perfect. (In '86 I thought he was utterly miscast, despite being already then a huge Redford fan!)

Thurman took seven years to write this bio, and even learned Danish in the process. She truly cares about her subject and thankfully takes her time. Dinesen comes fully alive in this book, a rare accomplishment for biographers.

If you go to Copenhagen, take the train north along the coast (20 min. from the Central Station), get off at the beautiful, small, old Rungsted Station and walk down to Rungstedlund (about a mile). It was there that Karen Dinesen, later Blixen, was born and raised. She returned in 1931 from her farm in Africa, and began writing her first collection of tales, Seven Gothic Tales, published in 1934 in English and in Danish (in her own translation) a year later. She "only" wrote seven books for the next thirty years, but oh, what books. It is indeed quality, not quantity that counts with art.

In 1991 Blixen's house was opened as lovely museum with a small tasteful book store with books by and about Blixen (she is always referred to as Karen Blixen in Denmark), and a very nice and quiet small cafe. Upstairs is a wonderful exibit about her life, including seperate rooms with many books from her private collection.

The rest of the museum consists of her beautiful living rooms and study which all look as if she were still living there.

Behind the house is a parklike garden which is open 24 hours a day all year round. Here are the flower beds from where she gathered the cut flowers for her beautiful arrangements, the meadows with cows and sheep, wood benches placed along the paths, and the enormous tree under which she was buried in 1962. It is a magical garden, which she herself made sure would be preserved so that the public may enjoy as she once did.

Thurman's biography and the film "Out of Africa" generated so much interest in Blixen that it became possible to fund the museum, thus enabling us to travel back in time and walk with Karen Blixen in her garden and her house 40 years later. After you read the biography, you'll want to book your ticket to Copenhagen!

A bit of bragging: My parents live a mile from Rungstedlund, and I return to Blixens home every time I visit Denmark on my vacations. Rungsted anno 2002 is one of the most sought after addresses in the Copenhagen area, and it is easy to see why: Right on the coast, with meadows and woods still unharmed by suburban development, the scenery makes me sigh with longing just writing of it!

Note: The museum has a web site.

Plenty IS rotten in the State of Denmark, but Rungstedlund is pure bliss, and represents everything that is good and beautiful about Denmark.

This is maybe the only author I know of where I enjoyed her biography more than the books she wrote. Isak Dinesen, she of the many pen names matured slowly while alternating her life between a pampered bourgeois life in Denmark and a wildly iconoclastic life in British East Africa that was partly feudal and partly anarchic.Two influences punctured her life for better or worse: her bout with syphilis that made her an outsider and helped shape her interest in huminity at large rather than her own household and the debt she owed to her dead love which she bungled when he was alive because she was in awe of him but who became her driving force and her hidden mythmaker once she had to cope without him. She was also lucky enough to live in a time when not every corner of the earth echoed with the ideas of everywhere else and that allowered for her originality where not all eccentric arrows had to be pointed into practical directions.
The chapters on her afterlife back in Europe show a brave and difficult woman who loved in retrospect and was celebrant, witness and victim of nostalgia for a gone world but she was also savvy enough to know that when life breaks your heart you can become a monster or a relic or all human potentialities wrapped in a finely tuned tenderness that makes sharing your experience an act of love and a gift to generations to come who struggle with their own version of alienation and heartbreak. Dinesen's Africa is no more but her roller coaster ride as a woman of talent and sometimes complex and dark passions is timeless.

When i first saw out of africa in 1885 i was only 7 and like all 7 year olds i thought it was a long boring movie. Although i liked the music, my mom always played the soundtrack on trips in the car. When a few years ago i watched it once again i was enthrauled by it and wanted to know more about karen's life. it took me years to find out of africa in a book store and i read and loved it! but when it came to look for Isak dinesen... i could not find it anywhere so years went by and i was in wisconsin and i looked in a used bookstore and there it was on the floor on top of a pile well i got it and it was very detailed and very satisfying, read this book it is awsome i am amazed how Judith was so dedicated to this book ( she taught herself danish) and spent 8 years finisheing this book. it is one of the best Bio's ever.

The Pure and the Impure by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette with introduction by Judith Thurman (Literature/Gay Studies). Recommended.

Colette believed The Pure and the Impure was her best work. I can't judge, not having read anything of hers but a few short stories, but this collection of her observations about human attitudes toward relationships and sexuality is insightful and timeless. It is also difficult and obscure at times, perhaps because of the translation and because there is no real structure to such a collection.

Thanks to her milieu, her position in it, and her willingness to seek the story, Colette could draw upon the most interesting people of her time-the givers and the takers. From the older woman who publicly fakes an orgasm while self-pleasuring in an opium house to gladden the heart of her young, sickly lover to the roué who exclaims of women, "They allow us to be their master in the sex act, but never their equal. That is what I cannot forgive them" to the circle of prominent women who learn the ways of sex from servants, dress as men, and love horses (she calls the most notable of these women "La Chevalière) to the "happy," alcoholic, lesbian poet Renée Vivien to the gay men with whom she seems most comfortable, Colette covers a spectrum of sexuality and combinations-including those men and women who play their heterosexual and homosexual relations against one another.

"I'm devoted to that boy, with all my heart," the older woman tells Colette, a stranger to her. "But what is the heart, madame? It's worth less than people think. It's quite accommodating. It accepts anything. You give it whatever you have, it's not very particular. But the body . . . Ha! That's something else, again." Thurman believes this sums up Colette's view precisely, the heart as a slave to the body.

Although Colette apparently wanted to remain an impartial observer, she cannot mask her own feelings and biases. One senses that she could not quite see a woman-woman partnership as "whole," as passionate, as capable of being the source of tragedy in the same way as other types of relationships. (Anaïs Nin will also hint at something similar in her diaries, at the "incompleteness" of female/female love.) "What woman would not blush to seek out her amie only for sensual pleasure? In no way is it passion that fosters the devotion of two women, but rather a feeling of kinship." She is fascinated by the story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, the "Ladies of Llangollen," who elope and spend several decades living together. During this time, Butler will keep an extensive journal about her life with "My Beloved," while, to Colette's consternation and fascination, Ponsonby remains a silent partner. Colette so romanticizes the Ladies that she says they run off together as "young girls," when in fact Butler was 39 and Ponsonby in her 20s. While there is all kind of detail about their living arrangements, from gardening, sewing, hosting an array of distinguished visitors, and sharing a bedroom and bed, there is nothing known of their emotional or sexual intimacies other than their obvious devotion to one another. They remain a happy, content enigma to Colette and to the present day.

The book concludes on a more personal note-about jealousy, "the only suffering that we endure without ever becoming used to it." She maintains that "a man never belongs to us" and hints at the unique and not unfriendly relationship two female rivals may have-even rivals who wish to kill one another. When one rival tells Colette all the things that had prevented her from killing Colette in Rambouillet (missed train, stalled car, etc.), Colette says, "I was not in Rambouillet." The relationship between her and her rival becomes more interesting, more revealing, more important, and more affectionate than with the man over whom they duel.

Colette suffered what many turn-of-the-century female intellectuals must have-a society's fear of "masculine" women who are too intelligent, too outspoken, too knowing. When she offers to travel with the roué (apparently as a friend), he says in seriousness, "I only like to travel with women," which, a moment later, is softened by, "You, a woman? Why, try as you will . . ." Even today, there are women who have experienced this.

"This is a sad book," Colette said. "It doesn't warm itself at the fire of love, because the flesh doesn't cheer up its ardent servants." Thurman adds, "This great ode to emptiness was written by a woman who felt full."

The Pure and the Impure is a must read for anyone who enjoys Colette's other writings; it is the most autobiographical of her works. Recommended.

Diane L. Schirf, 1 January 2002.

Colette, perhaps best known to Americans as the author of "Gigi" (1945) was a prolific French novelist, critic, playwright, and performer. She also wrote the four "Claudine" novels (1900-1903), and became celebrated for "Cheri" (1920; followed by "The Last of Cheri" in 1926).

She regarded "The Pure and the Impure" as her best work; a mostly autobiographical treatise on Eros and love, particularly Sapphic love. She mixes a reporter's objectivity with deeply felt analysis psychological and philosophical observations. Sometimes she takes a dispassionate, almost distant look at passion; other times her emotional attachments to her subjects--primarily lesbian aristocrats and artistes--are candidly exposed.

She is an exquisite writer without being precious. Colette bends words and phrases perfectly, and one is struck by her vivid yet subtle prose, as evocative as Woolf but perhaps even more sensual. "The Pure and the Impure" contains memorable passages of keen observation and wit, and one feels drawn to her observations:

"...I delighted in the...empty gaiety of the chatter and the diverting and challenging exchange of glances, the cryptic reference to certain treasons, comprehended at once, and the sudden outbursts of ferocity. I reveled...in their half-spoken language, the exchange of threats, of promises, as if, once the slow-thinking male had been banished, every message from woman to woman became clear and overwhelming, restricted to a small but infallible number of signs..."

This is not to deny, however, that reading the book is sometimes difficult. Whether due to the translation, the era, or Colette's particular style, her writing can be challenging, particularly her last chapter, a very subjective, personal description of jealousy.

This is a beautifully written book about the erotic, about men and women, and about the natural history of love. I urge you to introduce yourself to her writings. Highly recommended.

Claudine is in school and has good friends and boy friends that she often talks to and refers to in this book. She has as many problems as she does good events. She goes through her life as a journey and these four stories (claudine at school, claudine in Paris, and Annie and Claudine) she describes it in a college reading level but anyone who isn't is still able to understand it and get the gist.

On the strength of reviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post, my book club selected this book as a must read. To a woman, we found this book difficult to plow through. Thurman is enamored of subordinate clauses, tangential references and elliptical thoughts. If she were a journalist, her editor would tell her that she buried her lead at every possible opportunity. The book club came away not giving a hoot about Collette, who her mother was or who either of them slept with. Bottom line: if you are a huge fan of Collette, this might be an interesting book. For the rest of us, it is not.

On the strength of reviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post, my book club selected this book as a must read. To a woman, we found this book difficult to plow through. Thurman is enamored of subordinate clauses, tangential references and elliptical thoughts. If she were a journalist, her editor would tell her that she buried her lead at every possible opportunity. The book club came away not giving a hoot about Collette, who her mother was or who either of them slept with. Bottom line: if you are a huge fan of Collette, this might be an interesting book. For the rest of us, it is not.

I found this to be a very difficult read for someone, like myself, who never read anything by Collette and did not really know anything about her. We chose it for our book club and most of us felt the same way. The beginning was very difficult to get through while both trying to get used to Thurman's writing style and trying to keep up with all of the people she introduces. There was no real depth behind anyone's introduction. I didn't find myself caring about what happened to anyone. Collette was not a nice person, a horrible mother and yet I felt that Thurman was trying to show her in an abused wife role which didn't really fit. I couldn't really figure her out or where she was coming from. I know this is a biography and that Thurman is just telling the facts, but I found it very challenging to read and try to make sense of all of those pieces of information.