Bonjour Tristesse - Francoise Sagan

"Bonjour Tristesse" is the story of one summer in the life of Cécile, a seventeen year old girl, and her father, Raymond, a wealthy widowed womaniser, aged forty. Cécile has failed her recent university exams, but doesn't much care - she doesn't have to with her father around to support her - and all she wants to do is swim, lay around on the beach, and fall in love temporarily with Cyril, a young man she meets in the sea. She is comfortable and innocent in her hedonistic life, with no mother and a careless father who she barely knew before her return from boarding school to start university in Paris. Raymond has brought along Elsa, his current, ...  Read the complete review

Reading Bonjour Tristesse, I quite helplessly found myself drawing comparisons between it and J.B. Priestley's: An Inspector Calls. I quite fancied the idea that if one of the younger Birlings had written about the tragedy they were complicit in, this is how it would have been. Such a mature and pensive style would've been the most appropriate; this narration angle, the most suitable. It's easy to see why the novel caused such a scandal in France at the time of it's original publication. Unlike the aforementioned English play, this French novel doesn't have a nuclear family at it's core, but a vivacious libertine, living a hedonistic ...  Read the complete review

Bonjour Tristesse is the story of Cecile, a precocious 17 year old girl coming to terms with, and later trying to sabotage, the newly formed relationship between her widowed father and the woman who had previously epitomised what she wanted to become. Told from Cecile's point of view, the story is set in the French Riviera. On holiday with her promiscuous, hedonistic father and his latest conquest, the youthful red-head eye candy, Elsa. Cecile, meanwhile, catches the eye of the local amorous fisherman, Cyril. All is calm until the arrival of her father's long time friend, Anne. Things become unsettled to say the least when it is announced that her father ...  Read the complete review