"Bonjour Tristesse" (EN) Part 2 Ch. 3

Raconte-moi une histoire… A daily reading series
Bonjour Tristesse is French author Françoise Sagan's best-known and first novel, published in 1954 when she was only 18 years old. It is the story of a jealous, sophisticated 17-year-old girl who meddles in her father’s impending remarriage with tragic consequences. The book was written with a tone of cynical disillusionment, and it hewed to traditional form during a period of experimentation in French fiction.
"Funny, immoral and thoroughly French" - The Times
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Each reading releases as a youtube link, premiering each day at 8 p.m. because this is a novel for grown-ups.
Watch past readings on the Bonjour Tristesse KZbin playlist.
Each reading is between 10 and 15 minutes long, starting Monday June 22th.
Our thanks go to our readers for their invaluable contributions: Isabelle David and Hannah McDonald.
Hannah McDonald is originally from Chicago. She performs improv and sketch comedy at the iO Theater. When she isn’t performing comedy, she’s writing and performing poetry at the Uptown Poetry Slam at The Green Mill.
Isabelle David directs the Franco-American School in Chicago, teaches literature classes, and is the author of the blog "Sur un livre perchée", which offers some texts, poems, and reflections for all those who are passionate about literature and the arts.
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More about Bonjour Tristesse / Hello Sadness:
In the summer of 1953, Françoise Quoirez secretly wrote her novel in three weeks. The writer was a minor at the time and her father, for fear of seeing the family harassed after searching for her name, which only appears once in the phone book, advised her to take a pseudonym. Françoise, who already adored Proust, chose the name of Prince de Sagan in “À la recherche du temps perdu” (“In Seach of Lost Time” in English). Launched in 20.000 copies in March 1954, against a backdrop of women's emancipation, the novel received a suspicious critical reception. But in May, Bonjour tristesse is awarded the Critics' Prize, which arouses the interest of the press and receives rave reviews.
Sales reach two millions copies in 2011: it is one of the biggest bestsellers in the history of French publishing. The novel is even included in the list “Les cent livres du siècle” ("The hundred books of the century" in English), a French classification established in 1999 as part of an operation organised by Fnac and Le Monde. An English-language film adaptation was released in 1958.
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More about Françoise Sagan:
Françoise Sagan, pseudonym of Françoise Quoirez, (born in 1935 - died in 2004) is a French novelist and dramatist. Fond of traveling in the United States, she was often seen with Truman Capote and Ava Gardner. Most of Sagan’s novels feature aimless people who are involved in tangled, often amoral relationships. Almost all her protagonists are young women involved sexually with older, world-weary men or, less frequently, middle-aged women and their young lovers. Sagan died of a pulmonary embolism in 2004 at the age of 69. In his memorial statement, the French President Jacques Chirac said: “With her death, France loses one of its most brilliant and sensitive writers - an eminent figure of our literary life”.
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Why did I choose Sagan? By Isabelle David
· Because she embodies in her work as in her life a certain lightness, an appearance of casualness that hides gravity and depth
· Because it is both traditional in its form/style and revolutionary in its themes
· Because it emphasizes freedom, love, pleasure, and shows need as well as the torments of loneliness.
Then why "Hello sadness"?
· For the mysterious beauty of its title borrowed from the poem by Eluard
· For the sun that emanates from it
· For his insubordination, his classical rigour, and his grace
· For its timelessness, because although the novel was published in 1954, it has not aged a bit over the years.
What is "Hello Sadness"?
· A fiery novel that propels the young Sagan into the Olympus of literature
· The story of a teenage girl who refuses all the moulds of society and marvellously combines innocence and perversity
· The staging of 5 characters prey to the games of seduction and jealousy
· A plunge into human consciousness and passions.
In short, a small, serious and fresh book.