AU REVOIR, TRISTESSE

LESSONS IN HAPPINESS FROM FRENCH LITERATURE

VIV GROSKOP

Abrams, 256pp, £17.99, ebook £10.39

As John Walsh observed in the Sunday Times, Viv Groskop’s new book joins a ‘small but growing literary genre that presents works of literature as, essentially, forms of medication or manuals of self-help’.

Groskop applies some liberal doses of her own autobiography to her reflections on 12 novelists who embody a ‘swagger’ she sees as enviably French, or at least not horribly English. It all started, according to the Observer’s Hepzibah Anderson, when the teenage Groskop saw Françoise Sagan on telly in the 1980s.‘the novelist embodied an elusive feeling that the English teen was determined to claim for herself.’ Caroline Sanderson in the Bookseller enjoyed a ‘blend of memoir, philosophy and literary criticism’ and thought Groskop’s reflections on novels by, among others, Colette, Camus and Zola, ‘construct a convincing case for the love and elan to be found in such works’. Over in the Irish Times, Sara Keating was similarly inspired: ‘Groskop will happily offer you her wisdom without the expectation that you should ever read any of the books she discusses. I, for one, however, will be dusting off the cover of my school copy of Flaubert to see what wisdom Madame Bovary has to share with me these days.’

John Walsh conceded that the book was an ‘enjoyable, chatty, wildly repetitive, often downright silly introduction to French writers’, but he thought the ‘“lessons in happiness” are never really identified’.