Sagan’s novel Un Certain Sourire, written in two months, is the new literary sensation of Paris. The second book is now out, and so is the verdict. This edition includes a new foreword by Diane Johnson, author of the best selling novels Le Divorce and L Affaire. Frank and spontaneous, vulnerable and cruel, thoughtless and insightful, Sagan’s young narrator explores such perennial themes as unrequited love and the precarious balance of irrational emotions and self restraint. His worldly uncle strikes her as more exciting, appealingly risky and forbidden. She is fond of her loyal boyfriend, but he, too, bores her. Like Bonjour Tristesse, this story is set in Paris in the 1950s and told by a young student bored by her law books, restless and curious about love and sex. But her second novel, A Certain Smile, less shocking and more psychologically convincing, was preferred by many critics. The internationally beloved story of a precocious teenager’s attempts to understand and control the world around her, Fran oise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse is a beautifully composed, wonderfully ambiguous celebration of sexual liberation, at once sympathetic and powerfully unsparing.įran oise Sagan is best known for her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, which caused a scandal when she first published it at the age of eighteen in 1953. And when a relationship begins to develop between the adults, C cile and her lover set in motion a plan to keep them apart…

But the arrival of her late mother’s best friend, Anne, intrudes upon a young girl’s pleasures. C cile cherishes the free spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a ‘tall and almost beautiful’ law student. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father a handsome, still young widower with a wandering eye for a carefree, two month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress, Elsa. Endearing, self absorbed, seventeen year old C cile is the very essence of untroubled amorality.

La Chamade by Françoise Sagan