“My Mother’s House (La Maison de Claudine) is Carol Bove’s new translation of Colette’s autobiographical novel about her mother. Containing six previously untranslated chapters, and as the superb introduction makes clear, distorted by their omission, Professor Bove presents a reading of the novel, informed by feminist psychoanalysis, especially by Lacan and more especially Kristeva from her work on Colette in Female Genius, which brings the original excitement and adventure of the novel in French to new life in this scintillating translation. This is an important contribution to Colette Studies and to critical theory, as well as a major demonstration of the significance of translation as Laurence Venuti (among others) has theorized. An absorbing work of scholarship, translation, and critical imagination.”

Daniel T. O’Hara

“This new translation of one of Colette’s most beloved books shines new light on the innovative, sensual, and groundbreaking talent of the most popular French woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. Always in the public eye because of her scandalous persona and sexual liaisons, Colette had in fact a far more intimate, deeply felt understanding of the intricacies of familial and sexual attachments. While the previous English translations chose either to ignore or to neutralize the sexual undertones of her choice of words, Bove intentionally brings them to the forefront of the Anglophone reader’s attention. Colette is newly revealed as an early writer of women’s desires, from the narrator’s possessive focus on the mother’s beautiful body, to the ambiguous attraction exerted by her half-sister’s unusual beauty, and her attention to the gay identity of a visitor to her country town. Derived from an embracing of the psychoanalytic approach to language, this translation focuses on the lexical fields tied to themes of bisexuality and incestuous attachment that are recurrent in Colette’s oeuvre. Praised by Simone de Beauvoir as the first French writer able to address a woman’s experience of her own body within a patriarchal society since childhood to middle and old age, Colette imbues her works with unforgettable portraits of women and their lived environment. My Mother’s House brings the reader into a world of French country gardens and provincial life rendered magical by the presence of the narrator’s beautiful, loving, and beloved mother. The appeal of Colette’s work is very much in tune with the desires of the 21st century reader: physical rather than intellectual, intimate rather than political, her style speaks to us as human beings navigating our own sexual, sensual, and affective lives in a world that can be as exhilarating as it is emotionally challenging.”

 

Giuseppina Mecchia, University of Pittsburgh

“Hailed in her lifetime as ‘the greatest living French writer of fiction,’ Colette has been a figure of curiosity, shock, and creative scandal long after her death in 1954. In this extraordinary volume, literary scholar and translator Carol Mastrangelo-Bové has meticulously completed the most complete English-language translation of Colette’s memoire-novel My Mother’s House (La Maison de Claudine, 1922), based on the author’s 1930 version. Restoring six vital episodes left out of the most widely used previous English-language translation, Professor Bove enters into a nuanced dialogue with the author herself, in a manner that continues the creative tradition of Roland Barthes on Balzac in Barthes’s own S/Z. Discover a more comprehensive Colette, whose transgressions—both in life and in her writing—challenge us to re-examine our own settled understandings of such topics as sexuality and age difference, married life, incestuous desire, and the race for beauty.”
 

From Nancy Condee, University of Pittsburgh

“In her new translation of Colette’s My Mother’s House, Carol Mastrangelo Bové lends a sharp psychoanalytic eye to the author’s work that grants us a more complete, and more complicated, look at Colette’s relationship to desire in all its forms, ‘that most majestic and disturbing of drives’ that has been overlooked or obscured in previous translations. This in combination with Bové’s attention to the beauty of these sentences, scenes, and images makes this a welcome additional resource to understanding Colette in all of her contradictions and conundrums.”

Emma Ramadan

“Carol Bové’s sensitive and nuanced translation of Colette’s important novel, La Maison de Claudine, provides a much-needed, and long-overdue, representation in English of Colette’s masterpiece that is deeply faithful to the key themes of the original work. Bové brings to her skilled efforts as a translator an intimate familiarity with Colette’s oeuvre. Yet what makes her translation of this particular novel especially noteworthy is the psychoanalytic framework in which it is conceived: by making desire (in both Freud’s and Kristeva’s sense of the term) an operative and guiding thread of her linguistic choices, Bové renders Colette’s French text into an English that is unique for its combination of literary style and psychoanalytic resonances. This alone makes for a significant achievement on Bové’s part, and it signals a further milestone in the ongoing effort to make Colette’s novels more accessible to contemporary English-language audiences, especially those with an interest in the dynamic interplay of narrative fiction and fictionalized desire in modernist writing.”

William Scott, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Braided Language: Syntax and the Poetry of Evie Shockley.