Dans un mois, dans un an Reading Order

Dans un mois, dans un an (Those Without Shadows, 1957) by Françoise Sagan is the third novel and the most socially expansive of her early work: where Bonjour Tristesse and Un certain sourire are tightly focused on a single narrator, Dans un mois, dans un an follows an ensemble of five or six characters in the Parisian publishing and cultural milieu — writers, editors, women who are loved and women who love, men who charm and men who are charmed — through a year of shifting attachments. The novel covers more social ground than its predecessors but maintains the same cool, precise, slightly mournful observation: these are people who live well, think clearly, and love without quite sufficient force to prevent themselves from being lonely. The title — 'in a month, in a year' — comes from a line that characters repeat to themselves as a consolation: whatever is unbearable now will be different in a month, in a year, time will pass and things will change, and this is both a comfort and a mild form of resignation. Sagan's third novel was received with somewhat less excitement than her first two — the ensemble form dilutes the intensity that made the single-narrator books so sharp — but it is a precise and characteristic work, and the milieu it describes (literary Paris in the mid-1950s) is rendered with great accuracy.