Bonjour Tristesse

When BONJOUR TRISTESSE was published in 1954, Francoise Sagan was only eighteen. The book became an international bestseller and launched Sagan to literary fame. Set on the French Riviera, the novella's protagonist is a teenage girl Cecile who lives a carefree and pleasurable existence with her widowed libertine father Raymond. As the book opens, her father is cavorting with another young ingénue, the pretty but simple Elsa, but as the summer progresses, he falls in love and becomes engaged with an older elegant woman, Anne Larson. At first Cecile dotes on the cultured and beautiful Anne, but slowly begins to feel that she is a threat to her freedom, and devises a plot to bring her father's marriage to an end. Full of youthful vitality, sexual energy, and tragedy, BONJOUR TRISTESSE is a gem of a novel that perfectly captures that tentative moment as the values of the 1950s felt the first tremors of a cultural revolution.