Books: Awakening in Brittany

THE RIPENING SEED (186 pp.)—Co-leffe—Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3).

The hothouse maturity of French teenagers has been a favorite theme of teenage French writers, e.g., Raymond Radiguet in Devil in the Flesh, francois Sagan in Bonjour Tristesse. In 1923, the late great Colette turned her fiftyish hand to the subject, produced a luminous and sensuously intuitive study of adolescent awakening. Republished in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter-century. The Ripening Seed has also taken scenario form as 1954's sensitively made but ineptly titled French film. The Game of Love. For the...