Summer Love with Françoise Sagan’s A Certain Smile
Review | Françoise Sagan’s A Certain Smile (2013, tr. Rachel Cusk)
Summers can be heavy when you’re young. Hot, sticky and humid. Stretching out with oppressive nothingness until you realise there’s only a few days left. Suddenly, suffocating boredom turns to desperate abandon, a desire to make the most of the remaining moments of fleeting freedom.
Throughout her novels, Françoise Sagan captures the experience of youth, particularly for young women, with consideration, compassion and excitement. Her stories may revolve around messy affairs and entangled relationships, but her characters are not confined to the roles ascribed them by their lovers or reduced by their pursuit of love.
Sagan writes women who are complex and conflicted, unapologetically emotional and undeniably fallible. Her protagonists give in to their desires, in spite of the consequences for themselves and other people, acting in ways that often prove self-destructive or selfish. And yet, their reasoning remains understandable, their actions comprehensible. They are meeting head on the struggle to understand themselves and the world around them.
‘And I don’t know why but I was suffused with a fierce sense of happiness and with the overwhelming, almost palpable intuition that I was going to die one day and that there would no longer be this hand of mine on the chrome ledge, nor the sun in my eyes.’ Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile
A Certain Smile (1956) tells the story of Dominique, a student in Paris who enters into an affair with the married uncle of her former lover, Bertrand. Their relationship, it is agreed, will be confined to a summer fling within the hotel walls and beaches of the south of France. Yet, though both insist they will not fall in love, for fear of hurting each other and those around them, Dominique inevitably finds herself infatuated with a man with whom she knows she shares no future.
‘Living, essentially, meant seeing to it that you were as content as you could be. And even that wasn’t always so easy.’ Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile
Once again, Sagan explores the irrationality of love, the intoxicating emotions of lust and desire. Dominique is not ignorant of the fact that Luc is older, even less attractive, than Bertrand. She experiences a hopeless kind of love affair that seems synonymous with early adulthood: intense, irrational, fleeting, and thus incredibly formative.
‘For when all is said and done, at least when you are young, nothing in life’s long swindle seems more desperately desirable than a spirit of recklessness.’ Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile
For Dominique, Paris acts as an enabler in her pursuit of the affair. The intoxicating, hedonistic influence of the city encourages her to indulge her most selfish desires. In the capital where anything feels possible, Dominique feels emboldened, compelled even, to take the risk; she can no longer play it safe. Bored with her life - the steady security of her relationship, friends she doesn’t really get along with, and studies that feel more like following the motions - Dominique longs for danger, risk and heartbreak. And she gets what she wishes for.
‘I felt utterly free and utterly happy. Paris belonged to me. Paris belonged to those who had no scruples, who were free and easy. I had always been pained by my awareness of this, because I myself was not free and easy. This time it was my city, my beautiful city, gilded and sharp-edged, a city you couldn’t hoodwink. I was carried along by something that might have been joy. I walked quickly. I felt full of impatience and of my own strength. I felt young, ridiculously young. In those moments of wild happiness I had the impression of arriving at a truth much more self-evident than the poor, hackneyed little truths learnt in times when I had been unhappy.’ Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile
Dominique is caught between two versions of herself, between her childhood and adult life. Growing up, it seems, involves choosing between putting one’s own desires first, even at the expense of others, and towing the morally correct line.
‘It was as if my true self were somewhere very far away, far beyond the houses in the suburbs, far beyond trees or fields, further back than childhood, motionless at the end of a path. It was as if that girl, bending over that sleeping form, were only a pale reflection of the calm, inexorable self whom I was in any case already stepping aside from, in order to live. It was as if I had chosen to have a life rather than an immutable self and had left that statue at the end of a path, in the half-light, with all the lives that it might have had, but had refused, perched on its shoulders like so many birds.’ Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile
Rachel Cusk’s translation retains a distinctly French syntactical style, elegantly leading readers through multiple clauses that elongate and decorate the prose. It is a readable adaptation that skips across the page, yet remains sophisticated and considered in its choices.
By the end of the novel, Dominique has managed to escape the dizzying haze of first love. In fact, she can barely recall quite how definite, how final it all felt. Sagan assures us that life moves on, new relationships form and memories fade.
There is little time to mourn the end of summer, when autumn is soon to arrive.