Bonjour Tristesse Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Raymond

Critical Essay by John Raymond

[Bonjour Tristesse] is heavy with the hum of the noonday plage, weighted with sand and ice cubes, full of the scent of pine needles—it has everything Mr. [Cyril] Connolly implies in his phrase, "the arrogant private dream." (p. 727)

Mlle Sagan tells her story exquisitely, in a melodic, fast-flowing prose that is ideally suited to the material….

It has been suggested that this novel is slick and meretricious. Personally I do not find it so. Setting aside Mlle Sagan's extraordinary precocity, the book seems to me a considerable achievement, a work of art of much beauty and psychological perception. If the writer falters anywhere, it is, I think, in her melodramatic ending and, perhaps even more, in her portrait of Anne, who never quite comes alive except as a paragon and as a victim. But with the father and daughter Mlle Sagan excels. Cécile and Raymond, like M. [Albert] Camus's...
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