These two novellas form a natural diptych. What’s utterly remarkable about them is that Sagan was just eighteen years old when she wrote and published Bonjour Tristesse, which reads like the work of a much older and more cynical writer, and only a year older when A Certain Smile came out.
In Bonjour Tristesse, Cécile’s father is a widower and he and his daughter share a life of idyllic sloth on the French Riviera with his young lover, until the manipulative Anne appears to break the spell. Cécile’s response to this intrusion is yet more controlling and calculating than Anne’s original interruption and ends up having devastating consequences.
The entire novella is steeped in a cool complacency that seems somehow uniquely post-war, pre-Algeria French: the sense of place and time is shot right through it. (I found out after reading it that Bonjour Tristesse was filmed with David Niven starring as Cécile’s father. David Niven! It’s so far away from what Sagan wrote that it’s completely laughable. Personally, I see the role being played by Raf Vallone or the older Marcello Mastroianni. If you insist on a Hoollywood star, then George Clooney would be a decent bet.)
A Certain Smile could almost be a sequel to the first novella, although it’s mainly set in Paris and features different characters. It is tinged with a similar sense of lassitude and cynicism. Both novellas are world-weary and dripping with contempt for the lives they portray.
These books are slightly too melodramatic for my taste, but one can’t deny that they are highly evocative, and hold a certain fascination. They are both beautifully written and neither seems anything like the work of a teenager. Sagan, who took her nom de plume from a character in Proust, was an astonishing prodigy, both of writing and of life.
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One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.The Niven film of Bonjour Tristesse is fantastic. You can get it on DVD or, I’m surprised to see, iTunes. I haven’t read the book, but the film has a sort of absent cruelty to it. They’re totally engaged in hedonism but neither of them gaining a single ounce of pleasure from it.
It’s the most unsympathetic character I’ve ever seen Niven play so you don’t like him at all but, because he’s the most charming man ever to have walked the earth, you can’t help feeling for him and his daughter.