Bonjour Tristesse Reading Order

Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness, 1954) by Françoise Sagan was published when its author was eighteen years old and caused an immediate sensation: a short novel in the first person of Cécile, a spoiled, intelligent, morally unformed seventeen-year-old who spends the summer on the Côte d'Azur with her widowed playboy father Raymond and his girlfriend Elsa. When Raymond begins a serious relationship with Anne Larsen, a composed and respectable woman who knew Cécile's mother and who threatens to impose adult order on their careless summer life, Cécile engineers a scheme to separate them — with consequences she cannot control. The novel is remarkable for the lucidity with which its narrator analyses her own motives and the cool precision with which she watches the consequences of her manipulation unfold; Cécile is neither a sympathetic character nor an entirely unsympathetic one, and Sagan gives her enough intelligence to understand what she is doing without enough moral development to stop. The title comes from Paul Éluard's poem 'La Vie immédiate' — it is the feeling that Cécile names at the opening of the book, the sadness that comes with the knowledge that summer is over and that one has done something that cannot be undone. Bonjour Tristesse was condemned by some critics (François Mauriac called it a 'charming little monster') and celebrated by others; it sold enormous quantities and made Sagan internationally famous before she was twenty.