“Childhood is a picture, which we beautify,” Françoise Sagan wrote in her autobiography, “Réponses.”
Ms. Sagan, born Françoise Delphine Quoirez, was solely 18 when her first novel, “Bonjour Tristesse,” printed in 1954, induced a sensation throughout the globe. However she was not only a literary wunderkind: The teenage writer grew to become an object of worldwide press fascination (Pope Paul VI denounced the novel as “an instance of irreligosity”), and the caricature of these years would hang-out her.
From the get-go, many acknowledged Ms. Sagan as a real expertise, with critics likening her to the guy literary enfant horrible Colette. In Le Figaro, the French novelist François Mauriac known as her a “charming monster,” however conceded that “expertise bursts on the primary web page. This e book has all the benefit, all of the audacity of youth with out having the slightest vulgarity.” The thinker Jean-Paul Sartre deemed her the actual factor, and “Bonjour Tristesse” went on to win the Prix des Critiques in 1954.
Whereas the writer’s personal life encompassed the complete spectrum of grownup tragedies and pleasures — in addition to 20 books — within the common American creativeness, her picture appears curiously sure up with youth: “it” woman; French woman. At the moment, we’d add “nepo child” due to her mother and father’ social connections — her father was a affluent industrialist, her mom from an outdated landowning household.
Naturally, this fame conferred skepticism. (The truth that by age 21 her father had managed her earnings right into a tidy fortune couldn’t have helped.) There have been those that weren’t shocked, but unimpressed by what they considered a pampered daughter of the bourgeoisie, with middling expertise and an excellent publicist. (This paper dismissed Ms. Sagan, calling “Bonjour Tristesse” an “immature little novel, primarily a listing of moods skilled below the pressure of a father-complex by a reasonably precocious French woman.” )
“My feeling is that she represents one thing vital within the French literary and cultural creativeness,” stated the novelist Tash Aw. “There’s additionally one thing in regards to the setting of ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ that’s so quintessentially French that it stays within the common creativeness even when folks have by no means learn the e book.”
The e book is the story of a teenage woman and one eventful summer time within the south of France, a coming-of-age novel that mixes cleareyed perception with a vivid evocation of youth. The combination of the well-educated bourgeois schoolgirl — Ms. Sagan took her pen identify from Proust and her debut’s title from Paul Valery — and frank dialogue of adultery proved a potent mixture. In a quickly altering France, readers thrilled to a novel that expressed the ambivalence of generational shift; the remainder of the world, lengthy obsessive about a dynamic stereotype of French sophistication, was equally entranced by this prototypical, fashionable, politically engaged French woman.
First tailored for the display screen by Otto Preminger in 1958, the movie starred David Niven and Jean Seberg, without end conflating the writer within the public creativeness with the artless attract — and iconic haircut — of Ms. Seberg. A brand new adaptation was launched this month, helmed by Durga Chew-Bose in her directorial debut — with the blessing of the writer’s son, Denis. “Some folks instructed us we have been adapting their nationwide anthem,” Ms. Chew-Bose stated.
All through her profession, Ms. Sagan was defiant, going through interviewers with a brittle sophistication. “All my life, I’ll proceed obstinately to write down about love, solitude and keenness among the many type of folks I do know,” she instructed an interviewer for The Transatlantic Evaluation. “The remainder don’t curiosity me.” These varieties of individuals would come to incorporate louche luminaries like Truman Capote and Ava Gardner. Certainly, to her critics, the spigot of novels, performs, memoir, pop music lyrics and screenplays might have had greater than a whiff of the dilettantish.
“I feel that feeling of being very younger and totally world-weary is each a recipe for stylish and, to make use of a phrase I hate, relatable,” stated the author and translator Leslie Cahmi. “Of feeling one’s method blindly and realizing that the adults are simply as misplaced as you might be. Sagan’s postwar French prosperity is haunted by a faint fragrance of existentialist desperation.”
Ms. Sagan actually appeared to seize one thing: the jaded French bourgeoisie, in love, surrounded by interiors and elegance. Her books paint a vivid image of a milieu she knew intimately. And in a world earlier than autofiction, her finest writing had tight and disciplined plotting. “Nothing is extra unreal than sure so-called realist novels — they’re nightmares,” she instructed The Paris Evaluation.
To the writer Claire Messud, “Bonjour Tristesse” — and the furor surrounding its younger writer — spoke to bigger cultural tendencies: “French tradition’s intense need, tendency (at the moment at the least, within the ’50s) to have a good time adolescent feminine brilliance, nonetheless briefly.”
Automotive crashes, youthful divorces from playboys, a number of affairs of variable happiness and substance abuse took their toll. Ms. Sagan was, the critic Bertrand Poirot-Delpech commented with relish, “a chook fallen from the nest on which fashionable cannibalism reduce its enamel and gained’t quit.” She discovered contentment and stability with the vogue stylist Peggy Roche, however after Ms. Roche’s dying she as soon as once more struggled with substance abuse; she died at 69 from a pulmonary embolism.
However one way or the other the timelessness of “Bonjour Tristesse” — and maybe, the legend of its writer — endures, pressing and related. As Ms. Chew-Bose put it, “I feel any story instructed from the pod of a younger girl making an attempt to type by the turmoil of coming-of-age will all the time really feel fashionable to me.”