s.penkevich's Reviews > Bonjour Tristesse

‘My love of pleasure seems to be the only consistent side of my character.’

‘They were careless people,’ Nick says at the end of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, ‘they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together.’ Having Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan described to me by my partner as achieving more successfully what Fitzgerald set out to do in that scene, I knew I had to read it. And I am grateful I have as Bonjour Tristesse is a startling achievement in capturing the carelessness Nick describes but from the interior life of a teenage girl as a portraiture of youthful amorality and yearning for an unbridled existence. ‘I realized that carelessness can govern our lives,’ Cécile, our teenage narrator confesses, ‘but it does not provide us with any arguments in its defense.’ Told as a reflection on the events years down the line, this a tangled web of desires with Cécile pulling the strings in a complex plot to retain her and her widower father’s hedonistic lifestyles. Since ‘all plots tend to move deathward,’ as Don DeLillo would later write, and with the sense of regret in the narration lending a foreboding air, one can deduce they are watching a slow-motion car crash. St in the amorous summer heat along the French Riviera, Bonjour Tristesse is an infectious, psychological coming-of-age tale that will have you eagerly riding along feeling complicit in this web of passion and plotting run amok

‘For what are we looking for if not to please? I do not know if the desire to attract others comes from a superabundance of vitality, possessiveness, or the hidden, unspoken need to be reassured.’

Published when the author was 18 years old—only a year older than her character, Cécile, leading to speculation of autobiographical element—Bonjour Tristesse was an instant and scandalous splash in the French literary world, with accusations of unscrupulousness and moral frivolity in this novel of sexual coming-of-age and disillusionment making it all the more alluring. As the Times reported in 1955 that ‘famed Roman Catholic novelist, François Mauriac, said the book was clearly written by the devil, and that did not harm its sales.’ Born Françoise Quoirez, she adopted the name Sagan in homage to her literary hero Marcel Proust’s Princesse de Sagan, she would go on to write numerous books, though none that ever quite matched the success of Bonjour Tristesse. The title of which is inspired by a Paul Éluard poem which opens the novel.

From the 1958 film adaptation with Jean Seberg, Deborah Kerr, and David Niven

Still, this novel of teenage amorality strapped to a roller coaster of passions and the manipulation of love affairs opened the doors to many novels we have today. During my enthusiastic time reading the novel, I kept declaring that without Sagan we would never have had Sally Rooney. Not that Sagan has a detached style the way Rooney’s can be, quite the opposite really as Cécile’s narration is full of poetic emotional intensity as her moods rise and fall abruptly in response to her situations. In a way there is a kinship with the writing in Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl , which also positions the narrator as responding to their social environment.

‘Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.’
- Sir Walter Scott

When Anne, a friend of Cécile’s deceased mother, comes to stay along the Riviera with Cécile and father, she quickly pushes aside the father’s young lover Elsa and the two plan to marry. Despite her massive respect for Anne’s intelligence and ability to look down upon even the wealthiest of playboy socialites, Cécile sees the impending marriage as an intrusion into the carefree existence her and her father lead (not to mention a sense of jealousy over her father’s affections) and plots to break them up. She arranges her own lover, Cyril, to playact romance with Elsa to make her father jealous and shake Anna aside in order to continue her life of luxury without rules and pleasure without restraint. ‘I would be influenced, re-oriented, remodelled by Anne,’ she fears and fears the thought of her life changing. She finds herself quite fond of a quote by Oscar Wilde that reads ‘sin is the only note of vivid color that persists in the modern world,’ and aims to embed it in the way she lives her life.

‘I made this attitude my own with far more conviction, I think, than if I had immediately put it into practice. I believed I could base my life on it…I visualized a life of degradation and moral turpitude as my ideal.’

It is a youthful desire, an aspect of the novel Sagan so perfectly leans into with a lot of self-awareness for being a teenager herself at the time or writing. While the critics of the book chastised Cécile for hedonism, her and her father—who she admits is a libertine—likely points to a bit of post-war cultural context and the emphasized valuation of freedom. France had occupation and filled with a spirit of resistance and a yearning to be free. Cécile would have grown up hearing idealized stories of heroism towards liberation, finding empowerment in a struggle against restraints and finding ‘The freedom to choose my own life, to choose myself.’ Oh her father she thinks, ‘a break-up would be less painful to him than having to live a well-ordered life,’ and this statement is the heart of her desires to be unshackled from orderly natures of rules and ‘proper upbringing’ in order to retain a wild, amoral freedom that she has built her sense of self around.

‘it was for this I reproached Anne: she prevented me from liking myself. I, who was so naturally meant for happiness and gaiety, had been forced by her into a world of self-criticism and guilty conscience, where, unaccustomed to introspection, I was completely lost. And what did she bring me? I took stock: She wanted my father, she had got him. She would gradually make of us the husband and step-daughter of Anne Larsen; that is to say, she would turn us into two civilized, well-behaved and happy people’

The tragedy at the center of this story is that Cécile does in fact respect and appreciate Anne otherwise and had been excited by her coming. The two often get along, with Anne having played a big part in her upbringing and Cécile vacillates between earnestly wanting to live up to Anne’s expectations and wanting to rend the whole affair asunder. ‘How difficult she made life for us through her dignity and self-respect,’ she fumes.

‘I was not at the age when fidelity is attractive. And of course, I knew little of love: the meetings, the kisses, the weary aftermath.’

There is also an intriguing regard towards love in the book, with Cécile still young and naive as she pursues the older Cyril. French culture has an international association with romance, stemming from the depictions of love from the troubadours, the way poets like Charles Baudelaire emphasized the way art feels emotionally, and the history of French literature depicting feelings as instinctual over logical and love in ways it can exist outside of marriage, and one would not be out of line to refer to this novel as feeling, well, very French as those who had read it before me spoke of it. Love is very central to this story, but Cécile is more of a rambunctious tourist into it than anything else. There is a comedic element to the way Cyril, several years her elder (making it ideal to play act as Elsa’s partner) feeling guilty that he could have ‘had his way with her’ and being proud to tell her he resisted for her sake while Cécile is thinking more along the lines of ‘what the hell man, just take me’. The relationship dives through some interesting corkscrews in this emotional roller coaster of a novel. She even considers how she ‘had given myself to him because I knew that if I had a child, he would be prepared to take the blame,’ which is one of the many signs of her carelessness that she believes anyone but her should clean up her mess.

Sagan’s self-awareness makes this book work so well, with Cécile often shown as naive and arguing bad points Anne dismisses as ‘fashionable’ where even Cécile has to admit she is correct. Not that Cécile will ever repent, which is a major aspect of the novel. And it isn’t that she isn’t intelligent, quite the contrary, though she has no refinement and allows herself to be blown about at the mercy of her passions and flights of fancy. She is also cunning, realizing and finding ‘intense pleasure of analyzing another person, manipulating that person toward my own end.’ Sagan’s capturing of youth and the cruelties one can commit when they react from a place of reactionary emotional discomfort reads quite well and occupying Cécile’s headspace makes it easy to be swept along in the story.

‘ I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow,’ Cécile tells us but also admits ‘today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.’ Told somewhere down the line after the events of this story, we know right away that something will go awry and wait with baited breath the whole book to find out exactly what it is. It captures what Fitzgerald was aiming at with Nick’s speech on the carelessness of those with high social standing, retreating back to their lives with others cleaning up the wreckage, and as the novel concludes we see Cécile and her father returning to their reckless ways. Cécile admits ‘I was relieved’ when nothing of the aftermath can held against her and she casts aside Cyril in order to return to her leisurely life of pleasure, much as Nick accuses Tom and Daisy of in Gatsby. However, being told through Cécile we also see that behind the pursuit of pleasure she still does feel pain and regret, with an acknowledgement to herself ‘that poor miserable face was my doing.’ Outwardly she has moved on with nary a scar to show for it, yet at night ‘that summer returns to me with all its memories,’ and we see her haunted by it, though able to snuff those feelings out like one of her cigarettes. Yet still she admits ‘bonjour, tristesse!’ (hello, sadness).

Bonjour Tristesse is a wonderful portrait of youth, which is as brief as the novel at only 130pgs. Lovingly translated by Irene Ash, this book is infectiously written, pulling you through the ups and downs of Cécile’s moods much like the way she weaves her plot to break up love and set herself free. Beautifully constructed, this dark coming-of-age was an absolute delight.

5/5

‘Now I had caught a sudden glimpse of the marvelous mechanisms of human reflexes, and the power that lies in the spoken word. I felt sorry that I had come to it through lies.’