The Claudine Novels Book

Ha! Colette, you are a genius.

So it took me exactly two months to read this collection of all 4 Claudine novels.

You ever read a book, and it doesn’t really “click” with you until the very end, where you are like, my goodness, this book is incredible? This book was like that for me.

Claudine at School I liked well enough. The same can be said for the next 2 Claudine novels, which follow our vivacious and energetic young protagonist as she becomes accustomed to society and, eventually and inevitably, married.

But boy oh boy was I in for a rude awakening in the fourth Claudine novel, Claudine and Annie.

Colette has simply done something that I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen done so well in all of my reading.

She takes our previously wild, daring, hypnotic, rebellious, and even bisexual heroine, who previously was narrating the story from the first person point of view, and she thrusts her at us from another characters perspective entirely.

Annie, who is going through marital woes with a man she fears is not the husband she needed, encounters Claudine and Claudine takes the place of a sort of mentor to this young, worried girl, though at first she is more of a shock, as she startles Annie with her wild ways and loose tongue.

I don’t think I can put it to words justly, but when your previous three novels had one particularly wild and adventurous protagonist, and the last one has a different protagonist but the old protagonist suddenly becomes a reserved and careful mentor, and it’s done so seamlessly and intricately that it’s completely convincing, well I don’t have anything to say other than you are a literary genius.

And that is what Colette was. Genius.

What other author is brave enough to literally have a completely different main character for their final novel, and it actually works and we learn more about the previous main character than ever before?

Absolutely astounding. Colette, if I ever doubted you in my reading, my sincerest apologies.