Chéri and The End of Chéri

Praise

“These portraits of an aging grande horizontale and her beautiful toyboy are the most convincing arguments I know of against political correctness in fiction. Colette never wrote a bad sentence but countless good ones. Paul Eprile has miraculously recreated her in English for our times.” —Edmund White

“Paul Eprile’s vivid new translation of Chéri and The End of Chéri brings all the savage tenderness of Colette’s two-part masterpiece to life. These great novels of the erosion time wreaks upon desire and the inevitably tragic fate of civilization’s discontents beautifully reflect their moment—from the conclusion of the Belle Époque to the aftermath of the first World War. Yet English language readers today will recognize much of their own world, with its irrevocable chasm between past and present, in these subtle, crystalline, pages.” —Susan Stewart

“The two Chéri novellas probably form Colette’s masterpiece. . . They are her masterpieces because they transcend the notion of the battle between the sexes by concentrating on an exceptionally rigorous analysis of the rules of war. . . . The Chéri novels are about the power-politics of love, and Léa and Chéri could be almost any permutation of ages or of sexes. . . . They could both as well be men; or both women.” —Angela Carter, The London Review of Books

“Colette was not false, not even when she lied. Once a lie was transformed into fiction it stood as a truth, and survived.” —Mavis Gallant

“We call her great, for her gift to us is not limited to the art of writing: it is the gift of a culture.” —Rosemary Tonks, The New York Review of Books