The Other One by Colette

The Other One Reviews

• 
  Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂

  3.5★

  
  
  "She is made for moderate emotions, ash-blonde sorrow."

  
  
  I read a lot of Colette when I was young - she seemed to be very popular with Auckland librarians of the time! But until I found this book in a local charity shop, I have been unsuccessful locating her works.
  
  I liked this book without loving it. As another reviewer says, it feels very French. The translation by Elizabeth Tait & Roger Senhouse feels authentic and natural.
  
  While I found Fanny & Jane's alliance interesting, I never really cared about them. I certainly didn't like Farou or his son.
  
  Beautiful writing, but it didn't touch me. This won't stop me searching for Colette's better known books.
  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  https://wordpress.com/view/carolshess...
• 
  Carlo Hublet

  De temps en temps tenté de lire un roman de Colette, parce que j'apprécie énormément cette femme moderne et féministe. Mais souvent déçu. Ici, une espèce de petit "boulevard", ça se veut guilleret, et ça l'est, d'ailleurs. Mais trop léger, trop superficiel, suranné, malgré la modernité d'avant-garde de cette écrivaine, mais davantage dans sa vie que dans l'écriture, apparemment. Quand même envie de fouiller dans l'oeuvre, dans l'espoir d'être enfin conquis.
• 
  Stephanie Jane

  I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
  
  http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12922022
  
  Despite being set several decades and a few thousand miles apart, I saw similarities between Kate Chopin's The Awakening and this read, Colette's The Other One. Colette's heroine, Fanny Farou, is trapped within the same societal structure of well-to-do wives being expected to have no other function than that of an accessory to their husbands. In this novella, Fanny's husband, known solely as Farou, is a playwright whose fashionable fame keeps him away from his family for weeks at a time, periods Fanny bemoans as 'we are so dull without him'. Most shocking, for me, is Fanny's complete acceptance that Farou will be unfaithful to her while he is away. She reassures herself that her position as favourite is secure and as long as Farou's liaisons remain casual and distant, she can live with them. Conflicting emotions arise however when Fanny realises that Farou is also sleeping with his secretary, Jane, a woman who considers herself Fanny's friend although, interestingly, Fanny does not think of Jane in the same light.
  Colette cleverly illustrates the relationship between the two women through brief conversations and observations of their behaviour. Jane, assuaging guilt perhaps, is always busy, running errands for Fanny and Farou and attempting to establish an indispensable position in the household. Fanny on the other hand is lethargic and lazy, reminding me a little of Caroline in Andrea Levy's The Long Song. I was intrigued by her indecision, whether she would choose her husband and her companion and how the drama would unfold. The Other One is a small book, both in actual size and in its mostly domestic setting, but powerful emotions are examined and understood through the triangles that Colette establishes.
• 
  Vel Veeter

  Theater is rife for cheating as I am wont to understand and believe from the various novels I have read on the subject. In this novel we have the Farou couple, a housewife and a playwright. This couple is dealing with the very common experience of the husband putting himself out there in his field and industry and the poor wife having to basically completely acquiesce to these choices as they were not only the obvious choice but also the only choice. It’s a goddamn choice to be a playwright. And it needs to be said that men who create love to flaunt their beholdenness and fatalism in the face of their “art” as if those are the only possible ways to move forward. Colette loves to create men who hate marriage, feel unable to resist it, and then can’t even have the temerity to be gay or something understandable rather than simply not get married. In this novel, the great artist himself not only can’t help being busy, and being talented, but falsely feels he has some of that BDE people keep talking about these days. He’s probably most definitely a hack though.
• 
  Jason

  This book is something for fans of Anaïs Nin, but rather less heavy on the interesting figures (unless Farou happens to be Cocteau?), and decidedly uninterested in psychoanalysis. This also, unfortunately, has the ring of a lesser work of Colette's, perhaps? I found it rather unsatisfying in its brevity as well. I do intend to read some of her other more well known works.
• 
  Kathryn

  What the hell is this author trying to tell me? And "the twist ending"? Did I miss it?! What the-?!
• 
  Briana

  3.5? Surprisingly got sucked in
• 
  Emma Gentry

  What an absolute romp