Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature

Journalist Groskop (The Anna Karenina Fix) embarks on a lighthearted and insightful romp through 12 of her favorite French literary works. Her unlikely conceit is to locate the joy in works that most find downbeat: Les Misérables, Madame Bovary, and The Stranger, among others. As she searches out the happy lessons from these grim tales (from Bovary, “True happiness may involve quite a lot of hypocrisy”), Groskop weaves in her lifelong fascination with French language and culture, once the embodiment of all that was chic and desirable to her. Groskop presents her younger self as a wide-eyed reader who interacted with texts with the innocent freshness of a more intelligent Bertie Wooster, to reliably amusing effect. The book’s greatest asset lies in Groskop’s restating of insights derived from literature, noting, for example, Proust’s observations that one of life’s joys is a sudden memory, or that Cyrano de Bergerac can show that “all we really want is... [to] be slightly better than we are.” This is a book to dip into cheerfully, whether to recall novels read years ago or to find an entertaining entrée into those yet unread. (June)