A narrator who resembles her author both in name and occupation guides readers through the sexual proclivities and shades of gender expression that populated belle epoque Paris (with a brief digression to Georgian-era Wales). In cafes, cabarets, and opium dens, she introduces us to what translator Careau calls \u201cthe sexual underworld\u201d: lesbians and gay men, women who dress in men\u2019s clothing, a sneering, misogynist Don Juan, and others\u2014many of whom wouldn\u2019t have used the same language to describe themselves that we use now. (Careau believes that at least one of those cross-dressing women would likely have been a transgender man if she\u2019d lived in our own time.) And as Careau notes in her informative if occasionally stiff foreword, the book itself evades categorization of all sorts\u2014it\u2019s neither pure fiction nor nonfiction, and that narrator is a lot coyer than Colette\u2019s own life might lead us to believe. For periods of time, Colette dressed in men\u2019s clothing and took women lovers, but you wouldn\u2019t know it based on this account alone. Her descriptions can seem harshly\u2014even cruelly\u2014outdated: Of a circle of gay men, she writes, \u201cI will carefully avoid saying that they were not manly.\u201d Of the cross-dressing women, she accepts without complaint this question from an interlocutor: \u201cWhat\u2019s more ridiculous, and sadder, than a\u2026simulated man?\u201d But it\u2019s never entirely clear where Colette\u2019s irony ends and her sincerity begins\u2014nor who might be considered \u201cpure\u201d or \u201cimpure.\u201d As Careau notes, Colette\u2019s work would have been wildly broad-minded at the time\u2014and for the most part, her tone is more sympathetic than cutting, eager to unravel the many, many different layers of \u201cmy favorite form of brutality, love.\u201d As a whole, it\u2019s best read not as a comprehensive guide to gender and sexual desire but as a singular account\u2014one that was very much of its own time and yet, paradoxically, far out in front of it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A narrator who resembles her author both in name and occupation guides readers through the sexual proclivities and shades of gender expression that populated belle epoque Paris (with a brief digression to Georgian-era Wales). In cafes, cabarets, and opium dens, she introduces us to what translator Careau calls \u201cthe sexual underworld\u201d: lesbians and gay men, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6760"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}