Sadness darkens under the summer sun

Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) By: Françoise Sagan

Translated by: Heather Lloyd

(Penguin Modern Classics)

Françoise Sagan, born in 1935, was the daughter of a prosperous industrialist. She was only eighteen and had failed her first year at the Sorbonne when she completed her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness). With its publication in 1954 Sagan was propelled into fame as a result of the novel’s sensational success. Bonjour Tristesse was to be her gateway into the enviable philosophical firmament of 1950’s Paris. Sagan became a part of the famous French intellectual scene of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, inhabiting the jazz cellars of Paris’s Left Bank with the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Many works of fiction followed her debut novel along with writings for the theatre although none made an impact quite like Bonjour Tristesse and soon the media was to be more interested in Sagan’s wild and at times reckless lifestyle than her work.

This slender and often misunderstood novel is to be Sagan’s first conceptualisation of existentialism and a scathing critique of bourgoise France. The novel revolves around a seventeen-year-old protagonist named Cécile who after the death of her mother had to leave boarding school and join her father in a life of frivolity and excess. Sagan sets this intense story against a relaxed backdrop of the Cote d'Azur’s sandy beaches at once putting the reader at odds with his surroundings. Up until this particular summer that Sagan invites us to Cécile had been enjoying a life of no responsibility harboring no consideration for the future and oblivious to the idea of moral consequence. The two years she had spent with her womanizing father has proven to suite her just fine up until the entrance of Anne, a friend of Cecile’s mother, into the permanent vacation her and her father had taken up as a life.

For the rest of the summer Cécile struggles with an aggressive love/hate relationship that sees her admiring all that is Anne and at once loathing everything she represents. Anne who is to be her future stepmother is stability, composure and responsibility, she is the reality of life that Cécile, like her father, lived in denial of. Sagan’s young protagonist appreciated all those qualities that made Anne’ s character so sophisticated yet feared turning into it. Sensing her newly acquired lifestyle being threatened Cécile begins to discover a side of her she never knew existed. In an effort to rid herself of Anne’s judgmental presence she sets out to devise a diabolical plan. As she choreographs the players in this scheme she is rendered giddy with shock at the power she seems to have in manipulating and altering the actions of those around her, all of whom are older than she was. Between being actually drunk and being drunk on power Cécile learns the existential lesson, that no matter how hard one tries to alter the future, it remains unknown and therefore impossible to control.

                                      

I called this novel slender and misunderstood and that is because at the surface of this piece one could hurriedly assume that the tribulations of young Cécile are nothing but an onslaught of emotions spurred from teenage angst and one could be right. Yet considering Sagan’s background in the theory of existentialism and her struggle with religious shackles one must look at this novel as a study of amorality and hedonism and what could happen if this world collided with the world of realism and moral obligation. Sagan has the ability of subtly turning something as mundane as the lighting of a match into a moving psychological scene with great depth that will leave you rereading it over and over again.

Under the warmth of the French sun, which Sagan uses elegantly to portray the conflicting emotions brewing deep in young Cécil’s heart, at times imposing, oppressive and at times warm and comforting, and its salty beaches, engulfed in cigarette smoke and drowned in bottomless glasses of wine we witness a raging war for the most valuable of human rights, that of freedom.

Bonjour Tristesse was adapted into a movie by the same name in 1958 directed by Otto Preminger but as I usually tell anyone who asks whether the book is better than the movie… for the love of God always read the book first!