Au Revoir, Tristesse

Viv Groskop Abrams €18.99 ★★★★★

Viv Groskop was a provincial schoolgirl in the 1980s when she saw the late Clive James on television interviewing French author Françoise Sagan as she drove him erratically around Paris, oblivious to James’s increasingly nervous remarks about her speed. Even when Sagan hit a pedestrian, she simply drove off with a shrug (happily, only the pedestrian’s briefcase was damaged).

Sagan (pictured below with her dog in 1960) was the author of the best-selling novel Bonjour, Tristesse (‘Hello, sadness’), but to Groskop her couldn’t-care-less attitude epitomised Au Revoir, Tristesse.

Groskop went on to study French at university, devouring the country’s literature, convinced it contained all ‘the wisdom that we need about the pitfalls and pleasures of the ideal life’.

In Au Revoir, Tristesse, the followup to her guide to Russian literature, The Anna Karenina Fix, Groskop provides witty analyses of 12 seminal French works including Gigi by Colette, Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. As she acknowledges, it’s a subjective selection that misses out several Gallic giants, such as Baudelaire and Voltaire. Still, whether you come to the book totally ignorant of French literature, or with some knowledge, there is heaps here to inform, divert and provoke.

Groskop’s especially entertaining on the lives of her selected writers. The book is studded with nuggets such as the fact that Honoré de Balzac, creator of La Comédie Humaine, a series of 91 linked novels and short stories, fuelled his prolific output by drinking 50 cups of coffee a day (his record was 80).

Or the fact that Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, was a vain, syphilitic misogynist, who, if he existed now, would be ‘a try-hard Instagram influencer who thinks he is Timothée Chalamet when he is more like Austin Powers’.

Groskop’s pacey writing made me want to revisit these timeless works, and to try those I’d missed. Anyone keen to come out of lockdown better-read would do well to start here.

Julia Llewellyn Smith