Lucile is a thirty-year-old “kept” woman who lives a luxurious and carefree life thanks to her much older sugar-daddy / boyfriend, Charles. Instead, Sagan writes from the point of view of an omniscient narrator who focuses on more than just the emotions and thoughts of one person – how refreshing! Every other Sagan novel is written from the point of view of the protagonist and is very intimate and spontaneous (mostly because most of Sagan’s female protagonists are young ladies who are conceited and fickle and lovely and everything that defines an educated, confused, romantic upper middle class woman) so I was shocked to read that this novel would not take place inside the mind of one Sagan’s lovely ladies. The first thing I want to point out about the novel is its third-person narration. With that said, the effort is worth it! She’s an incredible writer and extremely entertaining, so please, put in the effort, find her books! On the plus side, those copies happen to be first editions – for some reason my county library has an absurd amount of first editions, go figure. Where I live, I have to special order her books from other towns and even then, there are only like…1 to 2 copies available. The novel was a smash when it was published (she was already a huge name in French popular culture) and was adapted into a film version in 1968 starring the one and only, Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli.īefore I actually start the review of La Chamade, I want to give a warning to the readers: if you are interested in reading the works of Sagan, you are going to have to put some extra effort into finding her books. Unfortunately, like most well known international female writers (example: Clarice Lispector – it was a BITCH to find her works translated, I had to search long and hard through out NYC to find copies and when I did, they were in poor condition or they were the last ones available), her works are out of print in the gool ole’ USA, which means you will either have to find an independent book store, go to a used book store, or find a library that carries her works.
This was her seventh and most well known novel, other than Bonjour Tristesse. La Chamade (Translated: Heartbeats) was written in 1965 by Françoise Sagan.
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