The Tender Shoot and Other Stories

by Colette, Sidonie-Gabriel Colette, Antonia White (Translator)

Real seller with inventory on hand. Trade Paperback. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Very Good. A clean, unmarked book with a tight binding. Light wear to cover. 404 pages. Date of publication not shown; circa 1980. Gribiche, The Rendezvous, The Patriarch, The Rainy Moon, The Kepi, The Tender Shoot, Green Sealing-Wax, Armande, The Sick Child, The Photographer's Missus.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

404 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1975

About the author

Colette was the pen name of the French novelist and actress Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. She is best known, at least in the English-speaking world, for her novella Gigi, which provided the plot for a famous Lerner & Loewe musical film and stage musical. She started her writing career penning the influential Claudine novels of books. The novel Chéri is often cited as her masterpiece.

Reviews

[Sean Higgins]

4.5 bc Colette is so comforting

[Mj]

I had been wanting to read something by Collette for a long time- a somewhat controversial French female author from the early 1900's; I was intrigued. This is a collection of her short stories I came across in the UCSD library. Based on this book I'd say her reputation as a writer was well deserved. By today's standards there's not too much controversy here, just interesting, entertaining writing.

The stories are all written in an autobiographical sense, as though Collette was recounting things she had experienced or people she had met in her past. She's really good at describing characters- it's easy to get to know the people she writes about. She's also good at throwing in an unexpected twist at the end of many of her stories- something you assume to be true while reading turns out to be all wrong! Though old, these stories do not seem dated at all- they are easy to get into and enjoy.

[Jennine]

A slightly uneven but intriguing collection of short stories, The Tender Shoot works best (as in "Bella-Vista", "The Tender Shoot", "Gribiche", "The Photographer's Missus") when Colette inserts a version of herself as the narrator. Her insights into the characters and events around her, and her own reactions to them, give the reader a sense of being the privileged confidant of a woman with a wide and varied experience. These are, by and large, stories worth savoring, and I might have given the book four stars if one of the stories I found weakest, "The Sick Child", wasn't near the end of the book, and therefore very fresh in my mind.