Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile by Françoise Sagan
Published 2013 · 66,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile to read?
Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Clear French, well translated.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Elegant sentences of moderate length.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete summer with a running moral argument.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Light; both novellas are short.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- A narrator whose account of her own motives is not reliable.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The sea and the villa do modest work.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Steady distance between Cécile's coolness and what she has done.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The consequence lands but the guilt is left unsettled.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Linear retrospective.
How Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile is regarded
Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile holds a literary regard score of 63 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.