“Childhood is a picture, which we enhance,” 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, prompted a sensation throughout the globe. However she was not only a literary wunderkind: The teenage creator turned 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 man literary enfant horrible Colette. In Le Figaro, the French novelist François Mauriac referred to as her a “charming monster,” however conceded that “expertise bursts on the primary web page. This guide 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 creator’s personal life encompassed the total spectrum of grownup tragedies and pleasures — in addition to 20 books — within the well-liked American creativeness, her picture appears curiously certain up with youth: “it” lady; French lady. Right now, we’d add “nepo child” due to her dad and mom’ social connections — her father was a affluent industrialist, her mom from an previous landowning household.
Naturally, this popularity 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 awesome publicist. (This paper dismissed Ms. Sagan, calling “Bonjour Tristesse” an “immature little novel, primarily a list of moods skilled underneath the pressure of a father-complex by a reasonably precocious French lady.” )
“My feeling is that she represents one thing essential within the French literary and cultural creativeness,” mentioned the novelist Tash Aw. “There’s additionally one thing concerning the setting of ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ that’s so quintessentially French that it stays within the well-liked creativeness even when folks have by no means learn the guide.”
The guide is the story of a teenage lady 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 lady.
First tailored for the display screen by Otto Preminger in 1958, the movie starred David Niven and Jean Seberg, endlessly conflating the creator 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 creator’s son, Denis. “Some folks informed us we had been adapting their nationwide anthem,” Ms. Chew-Bose mentioned.
All through her profession, Ms. Sagan was defiant, going through interviewers with a brittle sophistication. “All my life, I’ll proceed obstinately to jot down about love, solitude and fervour among the many sort of folks I do know,” she informed an interviewer for The Transatlantic Assessment. “The remaining 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 believe 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,” mentioned the author and translator Leslie Cahmi. “Of feeling one’s approach 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 definitely appeared to seize one thing: the jaded French bourgeoisie, in love, surrounded by interiors and magnificence. 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 informed The Paris Assessment.
To the creator Claire Messud, “Bonjour Tristesse” — and the furor surrounding its younger creator — spoke to bigger cultural tendencies: “French tradition’s intense want, tendency (at the moment at the least, within the ’50s) to have fun adolescent feminine brilliance, nonetheless briefly.”
Automobile 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 tooth and received’t hand over.” She discovered contentment and stability with the style stylist Peggy Roche, however after Ms. Roche’s loss of life she as soon as once more struggled with substance abuse; she died at 69 from a pulmonary embolism.
However by some means the timelessness of “Bonjour Tristesse” — and maybe, the legend of its creator — endures, pressing and related. As Ms. Chew-Bose put it, “I believe any story informed from the pod of a younger girl making an attempt to type by way of the turmoil of coming-of-age will at all times really feel fashionable to me.”