A scandalous little French bite for your trail lunch.
Bonjour Tristesse
An eighteen-year-old's scandalous debut about a teenage girl whose sun-drenched summer on the French Riviera turns cruel.
135g
Weighs the same as Top Ramen + Flour Tortilla
- Lightweight
- Carries You Away
- Fiction
Françoise Sagan was just eighteen in 1954 when she wrote this razor-sharp (and nearly razor-thin) masterpiece of teenage cynicism and sun-drenched malice. It is a single hot summer on the French Riviera with seventeen-year-old Cécile, her hedonistic father, and the small cruel scheme she sets in motion to keep her life exactly how she likes it by ruining his plans to remarry a sensible, moral woman. A brilliant, cold-blooded, glittering cocktail of youth, boredom and tragedy. Pack it for when you need a scandalous little French bite with your trail lunch.
Field notes
When Bonjour Tristesse appeared, François Mauriac called its eighteen-year-old author a “charming little monster.” The scandal was as much literary as moral: here was a teenage girl writing with the cool, unsentimental assurance of an older novelist. Mauriac invoked Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons, placing Cécile's calculated cruelties in a tradition of elegant French amorality. Sagan herself later suggested that what truly offended readers was a young woman enjoying sex without love or punishment.