Two French Novellas

For a very long time my mother had a copy of Francoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse and then it got lost in our travels. For one reason or the other I never got around to reading it but it always carried the suggestion of something quite chic and sophisticated and of course there was the evocative title. I spotted it at Basement Books a few months ago – the book included Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile - and of course ended up buying it. It was a pleasant enough read though I am sure for someone who was young in the 60s, as my mother was, it must have been fairly radical and the kind of book you would carry around to establish yourself as hip, chic, well-read and the like. Sagan was in her teens when she wrote the book and it is full of the ennui of that age. The two young girls in both books are tantalisingly poised between childhood and adulthood and the corrupted kind of innocence that they possess is both affected by and capable of affecting the adult world. Both books have very young heroines who enter the world of an older man/older woman, I am sure there is much to be read in this re attraction to a father figure and betrayal of the mother figure. Sagan writes flawlessly, it is hard to imagine that she wrote this in her teens for the novels are beautifully constructed, airy and spare. But the themes are eventually slight; they are really novels for young people.

Marguerite Duras wrote a few fictionalised accounts of her early life in Vietnam but unlike Sagan’s book, hers are an account of time recalled. Duras reworked the theme, which included her sexual precociousness, in several ways but the most well known is The Lover (thanks probably in part to a soft porn film version of the book). The books are quite dissimilar though both are slight (something the French do very well), well-written and deal with the romance or affection between a younger woman and an older man. Duras’ book is a lot more tough-headed than Sagan’s perhaps because it was written much later in life and has very much to do with memory and recollection. The older man happens to be Chinese so there are also a number of race/colonial connotations to the events of the book. Sagan’s mother figures are good women but Duras portrays her mother in a somewhat negative light though the reader can’t help but feel a little sympathy for a woman raising children on her own on a small salary in a foreign country and ultimately defeated by it. Surprisingly, it is not the erotic content of the novel that registers as much as Duras’ portrayal of being young and poor in the stifling and hidebound society of the French in Vietnam. The Vietnam Duras evokes is muggy, hot and the endless mud flats stretch into the horizon. Eventually Duras escapes it. Sagan’s heroines grow up and are left with a seemingly permanent sense of mournfulness, Duras grows up and becomes a writer filtering her troubled adolescence and reflecting on it through her fiction.