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Cheri (Twentieth Century Classics)
 
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Cheri (Twentieth Century Classics) (Paperback)

by Colette (Author), Raymond Mortimer (Editor), R. Senhouse (Translator)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (30 Aug 1990)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0140183175
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140183177
  • Product Dimensions: 19 x 12.7 x 1.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 364,937 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #15 in  Books > Fiction > 20th Century Classics > Colette

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Cheri (Twentieth Century Classics)
52% buy the item featured on this page:
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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant, delicate, well-observed and wonderfully shaped., 26 Aug 1999
By A Customer
Colette's CHERI is her masterpiece, a simple story set in the demi-monde before World War I. Lea, an ageing courtesan, has for ten years been training the astonishingly handsome and athletic young Frederic Peloux (the Cheri of the title) in the arts of love. Cheri's mother is also a courtesan and has ambitions to marry her son well. When a potential bride comes on the scene, Lea's function is over. She and Cheri must part company. But nobody ever took love into the equation. Separated, Cheri and Lea pine for each other and, against all common sense, each considers "throwing it all away" to build a future together...

The strength of the book lies in the fabulous characters and the detail, irony and unsentimentality of the style. It is a short novel - the sequel THE LAST OF CHERI is set after World War I when Cheri is successful but unable to find a direction in life.

Neither novel is heavy on plot or action - but the images and characters burn themselves into the reader's minds and affections. A pair of 'cool' novels about love, lust and passion.

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4.0 out of 5 stars A love story with a difference, 11 Nov 2009
This review is from: Cheri The Last Of Cheri (Paperback)
This is a novel (or two novels in one, in this case) about what it means to love, and in particular it is about the love between a middle-aged woman and a young man. The woman, Lea, is a courtesan, which in those days (early twentieth-century) was a more honorable position than the high-class prostitute that it suggests today, and the young man, Cheri, was a member of the idle rich society that Proust wrote about and would have been familiar with (and in fact Proust was a great admirer of Colette's writing).
After six-years of what was supposed to be a kind of educational, almost business relationship, neither expects to miss the other too much when Cheri marries a younger girl, as he was always expected to do, but they soon realize that they love each other.
As befits the writing of Colette, who was in a sense one of the first truly liberated women, it is Lea who has the strength to finally end their liaison, sending the weaker Cheri back to his poor neglected wife.

This is said to be Colette's most popular novel along with 'Gigi', which she wrote 25 years later, so having read the earlier 'Claudine at School' and loved it I expected to enjoy this just as much. I was therefore a little disappointed to find that it lacked the fun and vitality of the Claudine series, though there is humour here, of a subtler kind, along with good writing and real insights into what it means to love. Whereas with Claudine one can easily relate to the adolescent schooldays, it is much harder to empathize with the Parisian upper-class society of Cheri with its demi-monde fringes of almost-respectable courtesans, a world that no longer exists.
Another point about this edition of these two novels is that it comes in an unusual format that appears to be scanned from a much earlier printing of the books. The quality of the binding and paper is good but the print itself is rather poor, though not unreadable. Still, this is an interesting and reasonably entertaining work.
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