Author : Françoise Sagan
Title : Bonjour tristesse
Publ Info : London ; New York : Penguin, 2007
Call No. : 843.914 Sa18B 2007
Summary :
Cécile leads a hedonistic, frivolous life with her father and his young mistresses. On holiday in the South of France, she is seduced by the sun, the sand and her first lover. But when her father decides to remarry, their carefree existence becomes clouded by tragedy. United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love . . .
Bonjour Tristesse is Françoise Sagan's first novel written at the age of eighteen. It is a bittersweet tale that recounts a summer in the life of Cécile, a seventeen-year-old girl of a good family. She, jealous of her widowed father's relationships with other women, sought to destroy them at the same time she herself grew much mellower. Readers may marvel at her worldly cynicism and sophistication, at the callousness of the young narrator, and at the decadence of the French social set she depicted. For Americans in particular, the novel embodied what readers of the postwar time yearned after the indulgence French literature portrays. The 1950s was also a period when French literature was especially popular in America, and was more often translated than is the case today.
"On the terrace the crickets were chirping. There must have been thousands of them, drunk with heat and moonlight, pouring out their song all night long. I had been told they made the sound by rubbing their legs together, but I preferred to believe that it came from the throat, guttural, instinctive like the howls of cats in heat."
"This conception of quick, tempestuous and passing love affairs I found enticing. 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."
"A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else."
"On the terrace the crickets were chirping. There must have been thousands of them, drunk with heat and moonlight, pouring out their song all night long. I had been told they made the sound by rubbing their legs together, but I preferred to believe that it came from the throat, guttural, instinctive like the howls of cats in heat."
"This conception of quick, tempestuous and passing love affairs I found enticing. 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."
"A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me, but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else."
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