The Art of Boredom captured by Françoise Sagan’s Writing

No one encapsulates the tales of aimless people trying to hide their miseries and embracing a hedonistic lifestyle to overcome their flaws better than the daring and rebellious Françoise Sagan who at eighteen, wrote Bonjour Tristesse which was considered shocking and controversial enough to earn a papal denunciation on it’s behalf.

Françoise Sagan (1935-2004) [Source: The Guardian]

Her writing is an ode to modern French literature as well as the Parisian culture especially focusing on the aspects that resonates with a girl trying to find her way through life. The world of literature witnessed many legends whose works became an epitome of girlhood, whether they are Plath’s poems filled with self-destruction and agony or The Bell Jar with it’s revolutionary “descent towards madness” scenarios, whether it is De Beauvoir’s second-wave feminism theories or Woolf’s use of a new narration method called a stream of consciousness yet when it comes to exploring the themes of morality, recklessness, desire, youth, emotions, melancholy set against the backdrop of the bourgeois in the 1950s and 1960s, Françoise Sagan is exactly what you need.                                                            

Reading Bonjour Tristesse, the story of an impetuous seventeen year old Cécile set in the French Riviera feels like sitting under the sun, near a body of water, sipping pineau spritz and the sound of absurd conversations happening around striking through your ear while melancholia embraces you from all sides because you have nothing to do which is something the protagonist, Cécile is also experiencing yet she decides to meddle into the lives of her father and her soon-to-be stepmother. This involvement of young Cécile takes a very dangerous turn that scars her life and also of those who are around her. Was this involvement because of boredom or selfishness? Even after finishing it, a reader finds itself submersed in the writing and words trying to contemplate everything that has happened.                                                                                                              

The theme of boredom is an essential part of Sagan’s second work, A Certain Smile deals with a twenty year law student Dominique who is bored by her life. To overcome this feeling, she embarks on an affair with a much older married man Luc, an affair that turns out to be very unexpected for Dominique as she comes face to face with many feelings and realizations that she needs to introspect. For Dominique, it becomes a matter of love, as she describes in her own words rather than just an excuse to get away from boredom.

Françoise Sagan’s writing provides a sense of dreamlike reality to which a reader can escape to the dimly lit jazz clubs where the reader sits in a corner holding a cigarette in one hand and martini in the other one meanwhile crowds of different kinds of people promenade in the smoke filled atmosphere. Then the reader steps out to take a stroll toward Seine and lights up another cigarette. After a whole pack and a bleak fall night, the reader observes sunrise and gravitate towards the dreary life.      

Françoise Sagan’s writing is the most powerful tool found in her books that generates the most unbearable emotion into something worth reading about, maybe it’s due to her great ability that why she’s deemed as the “French Scott Fitzgerald” and as of now, even after her death and a turbulent life, she has brought into existence many of the iconic pieces of literature dealing with worldly values and carefree lives that are not as bad as they sound but instead they are the undiscovered masterpieces and evidences of Sagan’s mastery and wit.