FRANÇOISE SAGAN (1935-2004) – “Bounjour Tristesse” 1954

Twenty-first lesson of the 11th edition of the course in Reading Pedagogy, led by Professor Antonio Faeti, "The Moralist's Pyjamas": 25 Women Writers on the Island Never Found (March 27, 2018). When the "Sagan Affair" exploded in Italy in 1954, a serious magazine with excellent editors, such as "Tempo," sent a cultured journalist to France to closely study those corrupt youths among whom the author of the novel, cynically imbued with a lack of ethics and the triumph of a livid egotism, had grown up. Then, at the 1955 edition of the "Sanremo Music Festival," the "little king of song," Claudio Villa, warbling, along with the bakers' delivery boys: "Good morning, sadness, let's keep each other company today, the road, you know, is the one that once was of joy...", gave a uniquely Italian meaning to the story. Sagan did not follow the example of child prodigies who write only one book, but continued to work on books of varying degrees of commitment and imbued with a single, disquieting poetics. Emerging as adolescents from an unprecedented war massacre, they could not accept the old rules brazenly reiterated by shameless adults. The children massacred by the atomic bomb in Japan and the concentration camps in Poland demanded something entirely different. And so Sagan examined the "bruises on the soul" and succeeded, almost alone, in describing them. She saw the ambiguity of the marvelous clouds and never wanted compromise, defending her poetics with absolute rigor. Between divorce, alcoholism, drug addiction, and the inability to manage her generous earnings, Sagan was able to say goodbye countless times to an increasingly opaque, increasingly grim sadness. And she still awaits, even in death, a critic capable of grasping the profound meaning of her unmistakable poetics. Only then will it be truly read and placed among the great witnesses of an era still hidden among us, with its ghosts. BIBLIOGRAPHY AND OTHER REFERENCES FRANÇOISE SAGAN: “Bonjour tristesse,” Longanesi, Milan, 1954. “Bruises on the Soul,” Rizzoli, Milan, 1973. “The Wonderful Clouds,” Bompiani, Milan, 1961. “A Certain Smile,” Bompiani, Milan, 1962. “The Defeat,” Bompiani, Milan, 1965. “The Woman with Make-Up,” Rizzoli, 1983. “Do You Like Brahms?”, Bompiani, 1959. “Silk Eyes,” Mondadori, 1977. “Sleeping Dog,” Mondadori, 1981. TO UNDERSTAND: RENÉ RÉMOND, “The Right in France from the Restoration to the Fifth Republic (1815-1968). ROBERT O. PAXTON, “Vichy 1940–1944: The Regime of Dishonor,” Il Saggiatore, 1999. WILLIAM SHIRER, “The Fall of France: From Sedan to the Nazi Occupation”; Einaudi, 1971. ALISTAIR HORNE, “The Algerian War,” Rizzoli, 2007.