"Bonjour Tristesse" by Francoise Sagan

Very often during the days of early spring or late autumn we have such days when the sky is grey and cloudy, the ground is covered with dirty rests of snow mixed with rainwater and then you get the mood when you don't want to go anywhere or do anything and getting out of your warm bed into chilly and colourless street seems a torture. When such days come I know it's high time I picked one of Sagan's books. Strangely enough, though slow-flowing and melancholic, they always make me feel better on low days.

Like many other people I started my acquaintance with Sagan with "Bonjour Tristesse".This novel is very famous so it's not surprising that I've heard about it many times but somehow I escaped from reading it. It seemed to me uninteresting, even boring and I had no desire even to open it. But my third year in university was the time for literary experiments and I included it into my to-read list. I will simply say I never regretted that decision.

The book tells about a 17-year-old Cecile who comes back from a Catholic boarding school to find out that her widowed father Raymond is going to marry again to someone called Anna. For Cecile such surprise is certainly not the most pleasant one so she decides to have her own way...

Reading the first chapters I felt warm and I wanted to smile very often. Francoise Sagan is really good at transporting emotions, atmosphere. Cecile, the main heroine, felt happy and I realised I was happy too. I don't know whether good descriptions or my imagination have done it but I could see every character and every event as clear as if they were happening in front of me in real life. Having read it up to the end I really felt a bit sad but I can't say that this book worked depressive on me. I was terribly sorry for the characters though.

I sympathised Cecile. Probably she has reminded me of myself several years ago, I've changed a lot during this time but I still remember how it was, and I remember how I lacked love too. Cecile was eager to be loved by somebody, or better to say by everybody - her father, Anna, Cyril - and she wanted to have the time of her life. There's nothing mentioned about her life in the monastery but by her remarks about it one could guess she hated that way of life because it imposed too many restrictions on her. Cecile was much like her father, she wanted to be free and completely deprived of any limits.

And what was the most important she was afraid of responsibility which had nothing to do with her age by the way, she just was such kind of person. Nobody has taught her to be responsible before. They haven't taught her it in the monastery and her father couldn't do it because he himself neither felt responsible for anybody nor thought it to be necessary. Cecile was more mature that he in this aspect for she thought she has to be responsible but was afraid of it.

Actually from Cecile's remarks about her father we can see that he was more of a friend than a parent for her. He didn't demand anything, he didn't set any rules and didn't try to give her some advice. Cecile herself said that they've never spoken seriously and that was the problem. Nobody spoke to her seriously, nobody tried to explain what is love or relationship or that you should care not only for yourself but for other people as well. In her 17 Cecile had practically no upbringing, she's only learned some rules imposed on her in the monastery boarding school and some occasional facts that she managed to understand herself. It always seemed to her that life was very simple and one mustn't make much ado about how to live. Living this way one is bound to make a lot of mistakes, much more mistakes then people usually do and which are inescapable in our life. And Cecile made them quite successfully...

Anna, as she appeared in the life of Cecile and her father was symbolising a completely different style of life. She tried to set her own rules. She created some restrictions for Cecile and Raymond which were supposed to teach them to act more mature but for Cecile they were just restrictions which resembled too much the ones she had to obey in the boarding school. All that she wanted was to love, to lie in the sun, to swim in the sea and live without thinking of anything. That's why she began to design her schemes against Anna. And when she began to realise that probably it wasn't so bad, that Anna wasn't that terrible after all and she could be a good mother for her and even a better wife for Raymond Cecile discovered that she's already gone too far...

I can't blame Cecile even if I understand she was guilty. She wasn't mature than and she most likely never will which makes me feel sorry about her. She isn't a bad person after all and of course she didn't realise it all would finish that way. But I'm awfully sorry about Anna, it shouldn't have ended for her that way, she didn't deserve it.

As for Cecile she felt sorry for what she has done. It is felt in every sentence of the novel, in the mere way in which she retells the story to the reader. The whole book has this 'tristesse'-feeling about it. It's not the sadness that makes you cry, but that makes you smile, it's some light calm feeling just like when you understand that there was some moment in your life when you was completely happy but this very moment will never repeat.

I like the way this story made me feel, it showed me how easily we can hurt people who love us, how hard it is to find happiness and how easy to lose it.