Looking Backwards

The book gathers twenty-three pieces that had appeared across a range of newspapers and reviews, or were written for the occasion, and sets them down without smoothing them into a single argument. That looseness is the point. Colette assembled it quickly, in a country newly under Occupation, and the haste and unease show through in a way that a more finished book would hide.

The range is wide. Some pieces reach back to the salons and figures of an earlier Paris; others record the present — the exodus of 1940, the countryside of the Corrèze and Burgundy, glimpses of Provence and of places further off. Readers have singled out individual pieces, but the book's interest is cumulative: it is Colette taking stock, backward, at a moment when the future had gone dark.

Looking Backwards is best read as a wartime notebook rather than a shaped memoir. It sits close to From My Window, the other book in which Colette met the Occupation by writing steadily through it. It was translated into English by David Le Vay under this title.

There is no plot and, deliberately, little unity. The book collects twenty-three short pieces — newspaper writing, memories, and occasional prose — drawn from many sources and assembled quickly in the first year of the Occupation. The pieces range in place and mood: the salons of an earlier Paris, the 1940 exodus, the countryside of the Corrèze and Burgundy, and scenes further afield.

What connects them is a sensibility rather than a subject — Colette taking stock by looking backward, under wartime pressure, without shaping the fragments into a continuous account. The unsettled, miscellaneous quality is part of what the book records: a writer dating her own past at a moment when the present had turned uncertain and the future dark.