Bonjour Tristesse

I've noticed a certain tendancy in coming of age books.  I don't mean the Princess Diaries sort; I mean the ones about sexual liberation.  They all seem to follow a certain plot line: a young protagonist goes to the south of France for the summer, gets embroiled in some form of sexual intrigue (usually with someone older) and then it all goes wrong and somebody dies.  Our protagonist is left wiser than their years with an air of melancholy than replaces their innocence.  It’s a narrative that crops up in books like Patricia Duncker’s Hallucinating Foucault, and it’s the narrative of Bonjour Tristesse.

That’s not to say that Françoise Sagan’s book is bad.  It’s not.  I don’t even object too much to the fact that she was 19 when it was published and the entitlement that a thing like that reeks of.  It’s a good little story.  I know that sounds an incredibly demeaning thing to say, but there’s no other way to say it.  It’s more of a novella than anything else and it’s a story that probably couldn’t have been written by anyone much older than 19. 

The specifics of the plot are that while holidaying near Cannes, seventeen year-old Cécile is unable to accept that her father has split up with the young, fun, and flirtatious Elsa in favour of marrying the age-appropriate and rather more straight laced Anne.  Cécile being young and spoilt sees this as a threat to a lifestyle she quite enjoys and so goes about trying to end the engagement and restore Elsa to her rightful place as her father’s mistress.  Naturally, she does this by persuading Elsa to pretend to be in love with Cyril, Cécile’s own would be fiancé.  This all goes about as well as you’d expect.  Especially considering that Cécile’s father gives not two shits about Elsa.  That’s probably why he broke up with her.

I also have issues with Cécile as a character.  She is so selfish.  She turns her father’s impending marriage into a personal betrayal and is utterly unwilling to consider Anne’s point-of-view.  Only when her plan appears successful and she sees Anne crying does Cécile realise that she has damaged another living person with hopes and dreams and it is case of too little far too late.  She is not a likeable main character and any personal development she makes is not enough.  She is ultimately allowed to return to her previous life without her father finding out about her role in events.  Yes, she has learnt not to do it again, but she got what she thought she wanted.

As I said, I didn’t hate this book.  It’s a good quick read.  I just think I read it when I was too old.  It felt a bit like when I went back to Catcher in the Rye.  Having read that first when I was about 13 and thought Holden Caufield was a miraculous poet, I was so disappointed to find when I was about 20 that he was actually incredibly entitled and whiney.  I spent most of the time I last read it feeling bad for his parents and wishing he’d shut the fuck up.  It’s the same with Bonjour Tristesse; I can’t understand Cécile’s motives because I’m not in that place in my life any more.  My parents’ relationship doesn’t impinge in any way upon my personal freedoms to the extent that it’s difficult to empathise with anyone sabotaging others’ happiness to ensure their own.  And it’s not just Cécile, I don’t believe that Cyril or Elsa would go along with her plan.  They are both my age.  They should know better and the only reason I can think of that they wouldn’t is the naivety of the author herself.

I’m now on to Alan Hollinghurst again.  This time it’s The Swimming-Pool Library.