Bonjour tristesse

“My love of pleasure seems to be the only consistent side of my character. Is it because I have not read enough?” Francoise Sagan was 18 when she wrote this book, yet her words have the insight and authority of someone twice her age. She captures the angst and selfishness of youth so well that it makes you wonder how worldly-wise she already was or whether she was just writing from the heart. What really struck me was how well she was able to depict the ennui of the privileged adults holidaying on the Riviera, dismissing them as frivolous party-goers and time-wasters with nothing intelligent to say and plenty of time to gossip and drink. This brief novella with its cast of unlikeable, selfish characters and its accurate descriptions of summer on the Mediterranean, effortlessly whisks you away into the lives of the rich and glamorous. A delectable summer read with a whiff of scandal and a sprinkling of snobbishness that makes it very French in its delivery. If the characters were as mature as the writing, this would have been a five-star read for me, but it felt like they all made an effort to be as obnoxious as they possibly could. “It amused me to think that one can tell the truth when one is drunk and nobody will believe it.”