Bonjour Tristesse / A Certain Smile

Published in 1954 when Françoise Sagan was just eighteen, Bonjour tristesse ("Hello, Sadness") became an overnight sensation and a defining novel of postwar French youth. Its narrator, seventeen-year-old Cécile, spends an indolent summer in a villa on the French Riviera with her charming, philandering widowed father, Raymond, and his pretty, easygoing young mistress, Elsa. Cécile loves this careless, pleasure-seeking life, and shares in her father's flirtations while beginning a romance of her own with a law student named Cyril.

The idyll fractures when Anne, an elegant, principled woman who was a friend of Cécile's late mother, arrives and quickly captures Raymond's heart. When the couple announce their engagement, Cécile senses a threat to her freedom and to the indulgent bond she shares with her father, and sets in motion a cool, calculated scheme to break them apart — with consequences she does not foresee.

Spare, precise, and startlingly self-aware, Sagan's slim novel is a study of adolescent selfishness, desire, and the first, permanent taste of guilt. Its amoral heroine and sun-bleached melancholy scandalized and captivated readers, and it endures as a classic of twentieth-century French literature.