Un certain sourire Reading Order

Un certain sourire (A Certain Smile, 1956) by Françoise Sagan is the second novel and the one that confirmed Sagan was not a one-novel sensation but a writer with a consistent voice and a distinctive moral universe. The narrator is Dominique, a Parisian university student in her early twenties who is engaged to the pleasant, reliable Bertrand and who begins an affair with his uncle Luc, an older married man of considerable sophistication. The novel traces the affair's beginning, its middle (when Dominique falls genuinely in love), and its end (when she sees, without quite admitting it, that Luc has always understood the relationship to be temporary), with the same flat precision that characterises Bonjour Tristesse. Sagan's particular quality — the quality that distinguishes her from the more earnest French novelists of her generation — is the combination of apparent lightness with genuine sadness: her characters do not suffer operatically but exist in a condition of mild, lucid, entirely modern unhappiness, and the smile of the title is the slightly rueful acceptance of a life that has given pleasure and taken it away. Un certain sourire was made into a Hollywood film in 1958, extending Sagan's international audience considerably.