Francoise Sagan

Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress, Elsa. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a "tall and almost beautiful" law student. But the arrival of her late mother's best friend, Anne, intrudes upon a young girl's pleasures. And when a relationship begins to develop between the adults, Cécile and her lover set in motion a plan to keep them apart...with tragic, unexpected consequences. The internationally beloved story of a precocious teenager's attempts to understand and control the world around her, Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse is a beautifully composed, wonderfully ambiguous celebration of sexual liberation, at once sympathetic and powerfully unsparing.

A Novel

Bonjour Tristesse

Anna Yada

I saw an exquisite pink and blue shell on the sea-bottom. I dove for it, and held it, smooth and hollow in my hand all the morning. I decided it was a lucky charm, and that I would keep it. I am surprised that I have not lost it, for I lose everything. Today it is still pink and warm as it lies in my palm, and makes me feel like crying.

Emma

Eine achtzehnjährige Autorin, die in den 195oer Jahren eine Erzählung veröffentlichte, die nichts mit der Wahl eines Ehemannes zu tun hatte, in einer Gesellschaft, die Frauen hasste, wie fast jede Gesellschaft bis heute Frauen hasst. Eine Achtzehnjährige, die lieber schrieb, als sich darum zu kümmern, bald der attraktive sexuelle Besitz eines Mannes zu sein. Unglaublich!

In the morning light he was as golden, as soft, as gentle as myself. He was protecting me. As his lips touched mine we both began to tremble, and the pleasure of our kiss was untinged by shame or regret, merely a deep searching interrupted every now and then by whispers.

A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness.

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