Book of a lifetime: La Chamade by Francoise Sagan

From The Independent archive: Anjali Joseph on falling in love with the French novelist’s work

The aloneness of each person, even in love, is Francoise Sagan’s real subject (Getty)

Paris in the Sixties: a woman and a man meet, fall in love, leave the partners they originally had, and try to be together, but life gets in the way. It could be the plot of a straight-to-television film. As it happens, it is a summary of Francoise Sagan’s La Chamade (1969), one of a series of slim, elegant novels she wrote about passion, its birth and death.

The first of her novels I read, in English translation, was Bonjour Tristesse. I was 16; its brevity and disaffection struck a chord. A year later I read A Certain Smile in French. Who, at 17, could fail to smile lopsidedly at a sentence beginning “I was gently bored...”? It sounds much better in the original – “Je m’ennuyais modestement” – where the four-syllable adverb languorously enacts slow times and considered ennui.