The Blue Lantern

Colette was in her seventies and increasingly immobile when she wrote this book, and it does not hide the fact. It records the narrowing of a life — arthritis, tiredness, the difficulty of the stairs, the world reduced to what can be seen and reached from one room. What keeps it from being a book of complaint is the steadiness with which she reports all this, and her refusal of the invalid's pathos.

Against the losses she sets abundance of another kind. Letters arrive, friends and children visit, animals come and go, and memory keeps opening the room onto other times and places. The blue light of her lamp becomes the book's governing image: the small fixed point from which an aging writer still watches, receives, and records. Written roughly twenty years after Break of Day, it answers that earlier book's sunrise with the light of late evening.

The Blue Lantern is late Colette at its most characteristic — clear-eyed, unsentimental, and quietly stubborn. Its wager is simple: to go on writing, and so to have the last word. It was translated into English by Roger Senhouse under the same title.

There is no plot. The book moves in chapters rather than discrete stories, and its subject is Colette's own late life: the physical diminishments of age, the confinement to a single room, and the discipline of continuing to write from it. She sets these losses down plainly, without dramatizing them, and refuses the tone of the sentimental invalid.

Around that steady acknowledgment of decline flows everything that still reaches her — correspondence, presents, visitors, children, animals, and a memory that keeps carrying the room out into other years and places. The blue-shaded lamp she works under gives the book its title and its image: a small, fixed light by which an old writer keeps watching and recording. The mood is lucid and defiant rather than gloomy, and the underlying claim is that writing itself is how she answers age.