A little tongue in cheek, a little reminiscing, and a whole lot of academic review sum up Au Revoir, Tristesse. The story reads like a dry literature review sprinkled with a few personal anecdotes. The vignettes themselves are informative and provide great detail to document the importance of french writers. However, it is not the most exciting stuff. I found it a laborious read, not because it was difficult to understand, (it is very well written and easy to follow). Rather, it is just not an enjoyable read. It leans more towards academic study then pleasure reading. If you are looking for recommendations on French classics or need some background info on them, then perhaps you will enjoy this one, but a summer read this is not. The author's anecdotes of her teen and university years are the highlight, unfortunately, they come too late in the book to erase the earlier slog.

This, then, is a book about the intersection between Frenchness and happiness through reading, as that is a place I have always found great comfort. My hope is to demonstrate, through the French writers I first discovered in my teens and twenties, how that intersection might help us all get more joy into our lives.

Viv Groskop is an English author and comedian whose last book I absolutely loved, The Anna Karenina Fix, about the unexpectedly upbeat life lessons we can draw from the notoriously gloomy well that is classic Russian literature, interspersed with memoir of her life as a Russophile.

Turns out she loves French culture and literature too, and spent time in France as an exchange student and is fluent in the language. In a lighthearted examination of French literature, she focuses on the concept of happiness, what it meant to these authors, and what readers can draw from classic stories that sometimes don’t seem all that joyful on the surface.

It didn’t have the magic for me that her look at Russian literature did. It felt a bit like an attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle, and can read somewhat scattered and thin. Her message seems to be something of having it both ways — having your butter and the money to buy the butter, as the French would say, she tells us.

She has an airy, jokey, chatty tone and intersperses the light literary analysis with memoir, as she shows how she’s interpreted these lessons in happiness herself. At its core there’s something lovely in the connections she draws, however surfacey they can be: “Being able to dip into the books mentioned… in order to keep that part of me alive has been a wonderful thing to cling to through life’s ups and downs.” Who can’t relate?

In addition to Francoise Sagan, whose Bonjour Tristesse inspired the title, Groskop looks at the works and lives of, among others, Albert Camus, Colette, Victor Hugo, Marguerite Duras, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and Honoré de Balzac.

The authors’ lives are interesting enough, if all blurring together at some point, for the men especially (so much syphilis). Sagan’s was the most interesting, and poignant, maybe because she’s clearly the one Groskop has the strongest affinity for. Describing the BBC documentary when her interest in Sagan and her fuck-all attitude was piqued: “She is a joyously indifferent shrug in human form. She embodies joie de vivre and the freedom to do whatever the hell you want.”

Groskop interrogates the idea of ascribing properties to French people that they don’t really have, at least not more than anyone else. Like discussing Cyrano de Bergerac: “One of our stereotypes about the French is that they are chicer, cooler, and more elegant than us and therefore above such things. The truth is, they basically invented pratfalls, and traditional French comedie is full of them.” But here there’s some back and forth — there was a lot of “We think the French are like this, but they’re really not”, spliced with stereotypical scenes and examples. It just didn’t feel cohesive somehow.

I really enjoyed her dips into the French language though. Her (quick) exploration of the French version of #MeToo (#BalanceTonPorc — “rat on your pig”) was eye-opening. And I’m glad to have the French phrase “un coup de vieux” in my vocabulary: “It literally means ‘a knock of the old’ or ‘a blow of the old,’…It basically describes that sudden feeling when you think, ‘Oh, I have aged!’ Or ‘Oh, I really am old now,’ and it feels as if someone has punched you in the stomach.”

The books I’ve examined here…can be useful at different times in our lives. I recommend Bonjour Tristesse as an elixir of youth to catapult you back to the feelings you had when you were seventeen: the sun feels different on your skin, people are mysterious and exciting, the prospect of love is fresh and uncomplicated.

This is when Groskop is really at her best — when she ties these books and their authors, with their historical significance (Sagan wrote this wildly successful first novel at age 17) into life lessons that resonate. Nothing earth-shattering, but a little uplifting, a little reassuring, with some laughs here and there.

I was shocked to find this book buried in the New Releases list of the Buzz Books Spring/Summer 2020 edition. I had read The Anna Karenina Fix about a year ago; that book had so much memoir in it that I didn’t think there would be enough autobiographical material leftover to create a second book. But one of the authors who I know is such a Francophile that I couldn’t resist reading this new book with an eye toward recommending it to her.

I took one star away from The Anna Karenina Fix because its mixture of memoir, literary criticism, and author biography was skewed more toward memoir than was suggested by the publisher’s blurb. That much memoir was off-putting to me; I just wanted to read about the books to learn whether any of them suited my needs at the time. With Au Revoir, Tristesse, I feel like the author heard and heeded my lament. The memoir in this book is just for color context - explaining why, at age eleven, she picked up French and why, later in her university years, she tossed French over for Russian. I appreciated her putting subtle markers as to how the timeline of this book fit with the timeline of the earlier book, instead pretending that the prior book didn’t exist.

Au Revoir, Tristesse focuses on a dozen authors within the classic canon of French literature, two or three of whom are female, with which the author feels particular affinity because they are classics. However, the author writes an excellent afterword about the selection of the books for discussion. She is unapologetic about her selections (the most contemporary of whom is Francoise Sagan); however, she also recommends numerous contemporary authors who are female and/or people of color. She tries not to forget the writers of the former French African colonies, who still use French in addition to the local languages.

Each chapter starts with a little bit of memoir, eventually making its way to a plot summary (with spoilers), and then into some literary criticism intertwined with selected bits of author biography, French history, and psychology. It felt like more of cohesive read than the prior book, with much better transitions. And, in the Conclusion chapter, the author ties together everything - the bits of memoir, the plot summaries, the literary criticism, the bits of author biography, etc - into a cohesive theme.

I appreciate this book because it drew my attention to some books (and movies) that I might enjoy. I never knew that Dangerous Liaisons was an epistolary novel, which is one of my favorite types of novel. And if I can find Bonjour, Tristesse in English, that sounds like a light and fun read to add to my list.

Overall, I enjoyed this book enough to be confident in recommending it to my Francophile author friend. The only reason I’m taking away a star is that it had a disproportionate amount of forced intimacy with the reader. Each chapter had its parenthetical asides addressing the reader, which only served to lighten the tone and add some humor. I know that this is catnip for other readers, but it isn’t mine.

I received this book as a digital advance reader copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.