Let's read the 282nd issue of the Weekend Salon on September 25
The lightness of literature and the weight of sorrow——
Read Sagan's Hello, Sorrow
Text/Surin
After a long summer vacation, the novel sharing series of world-famous female writers that readers have been waiting for for a long time has finally returned! On September 25th, friends gathered at the Million Village Book Building to read the famous work "Hello, Sorrow" by French female writer Sagan.
Girlish feelings are not always poetry, but poetry is the most concise and generalized. At the beginning of the sharing, teacher Liu Xiaocun read the French poet Erúa's "Direct Life", which she said summarized the mood of "Hello, Sorrow".
Don't be sad
Hello sorrow
You are engraved in the gaps in the ceiling
You are engraved under my lover's eyes
You are not miserable
Because the poorest people also smile slightly
Confide in you
Warm jade body of love
The power of love
Your gushing warmth
Like a demon without a body
Frustrated faces
Melancholy feminine appearance
Sagan was born in 1935 and died in 2004 at the age of 69. Born into a wealthy family, she was not a conformist girl since she was a child, and at the age of seventeen, she won the Critics Award for "Hello, Sorrow", and her amazing sales made her the youngest multi-millionaire, sitting on beauty, talent, statement, wealth, and was sought after and respected all her life. A true legend. She had asked her father what to do with the money. The answer she got was that it was too dangerous for a girl your age to have so much money to spend it. So she spent a lot of money, lived a life of deviance and happiness, and carried the rebellion to the end. Maybe for a writer, a simple, simple way of life will be easier to focus on creating, but how can Sagan? She has always been a constant news figure, compared to the identity of a writer, her life is more like a "phenomenon", although there have been works since then, but in art has not been able to surpass the height of "Hello, Sorrow".
The text of "Hello, Sorrow" is light and beautiful, looking at the adult world from the perspective of a young person, and grasping it very accurately, reflecting Sagan's extraordinary sensibility and control of words. Some commentators have said that this novel uses the simplest language to write everything about youth life, showing the beauty of French. In order to let the readers feel the language charm of the novel, Teacher Liu Xiaocun chose three chapters of text for everyone to read together.
After the rotation, teacher Liu Xiaocun introduced the plot to everyone, the story of the novel is not complicated, but she took out the values, desires, and choices of these characters one by one, analyzed their personalities, hearts and emotions, and let us experience the "not simple" of this work.
The protagonist of the novel, Cecil, is a rebellious 17-year-old girl who lives a carefree, bohemian life with his playboy father Raymond, whose lover Elsa is a beautiful, flirtatious young woman who wanders between men, and the three of them are the same kind of people. Although their lifestyles and values are absurd and depraved, they are very simple and pure people, easy to believe, easy to love, and do not like to be serious, deep and conformist. Anna is different, she is so "decent", an elegant and decent elite woman in mainstream society, rational and calm, indifferent to people but very decent. She did not look up to the cynical and playful appearance of raymond's father and daughter, hoping to let them live a normal life through persuasion and discipline. And that's where Cecil is afraid. She didn't want to. For Cecil, she felt that her life was completely fine and enjoyed it, and so did his dad—she knew her dad too well, and it would be a disaster if their lives were taken over by Anna. It was with this idea that she decided to plan a misunderstanding to let Anna leave, and the stimulated Anna was so emotional that she drove away and unfortunately died in a car accident.
On the surface, Anna seemed to be a victim, and yes, she was not wrong. A woman so good wants to save a father and daughter whose life is depraved, and is about to get married, but the fiancé hooks up with his ex-girlfriend at this time, and this is all planned by his daughter. But on closer examination, it could also be said that this was a heavy price Anna paid for her choices. Anna is inconsistent, her behavior and heart are divided, because with her values how can she like someone like Raymond? What she liked about Raymond was his high-society wealth and status to form a good-looking family, and Raymond was a simple, easy -- "mastered" person after all. Moreover, if she is really as calm and rational as she appears, how could she fall into the trap set by a 17-year-old and lose control in an instant? Perhaps, it was her caution, vulnerability, calculation or self-preservation that made her choose to take the risk and finally pay the price. Sighingly, her tragedy did not change anything, and a person's death was merely a "sorrow". In the view of Teacher Liu Xiaocun, Anna represents the "heavy" part of life, which is what Cecil or the author wants to escape.
In the second half of the exchange session, a reader asked whether Cecil's rejection of Anna was due to her rejection of her stepmother or to Anna as a person. Teacher Liu Xiaocun said that it should be a rejection of Anna's character and values, and she has seen Anna's hypocrisy and control, Anna tries to restrain them with this orthodox value, and also wears a "good for you" hat for it. Some readers said that they felt that there was a lack of a class in the novel that was opposed to Raymond, such as a group of people who had to rely on their own efforts to live a difficult life. In this regard, teacher Liu Xiaocun explained that from the situation in the book, Raymond is a kind of person who is partial to the nobility, such as their reading and talking, there are no poor people in their circles, and there will be no hatred of the rich in society, which is accepted in the French cultural tradition. The fifteen-year-old girl who came to the book club with her mother also spoke, saying that some of her classmates also liked literary creation, but they liked writers like Guo Jingming, who wrote works of that style, and she wanted to recommend the book "Hello, Sorrow" to her classmates to see what French teenagers read and write.
It may be difficult for many people to understand and accept the values of "I just want to live this absurd and shameless life" in the book, but it is undeniable that this is a pure love novel - love, not morality. Teacher Liu Xiaocun said that in a sense, China does not have pure love novels, as far as the world is concerned, there are not many, and sagan's feminist position conveyed in the book is also quite valuable, and the future study of sagan and the study of "Hello, Sorrow" will continue to heat up.
Editor-in-Chief: Song Kun || Editor-in-charge of this issue: Xiao Yuejun
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