『心の四隅』 - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Sarah Shaffi “Unfinished novel by Françoise Sagan published posthumously” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/22/unfinished-novel-by-francoise-sagan-published-posthumously

フランスワーズ・サガン *1の未刊行で未完の遺作『心の四隅』（Les Quatre coins du coeur/The Four Corners of the Heart）が６月末に刊行された。とはいっても、英訳本の話で、仏蘭西語の原本は2019年に刊行されている*2。

The Four Corners of the Heart, out this week in a translation by Sophie R Lewis, tells the story of Marie-Laure, whose husband, Ludovic, returns home three years after a devastating car accident that left him in a fragile mental and physical condition.
When Marie-Laure’s mother, Fanny, visits her daughter, both Ludovic and his father, Henri, fall for her. The book was discovered in 2011, seven years after Sagan’s death in 2004, by her son Denis Westhoff*3, and ends on a cliffhanger. Westhoff says of the original manuscript: “Some of the paragraphs were repeated, the plot included many inconsistencies, some sentences didn’t work, words were missing and the novel lacked an ending”.

Westhoff told the Guardian, in an interview translated by Lewis, that when the manuscript was given to its French publisher, Éditions Plon, “there was some brief discussion of asking a well-known writer to provide it with an ending”.
Names put forward included Slimani and Berest, as well as Anna Gavalda and Westhoff himself. But, says Westhoff, “I have never wished, principally for moral reasons, to complete this novel”.
“I have too much respect, too high an esteem for its author – and for the person who wrote it, my mother – to feel competent to modify her work, to add anything to it,” he adds.

Westhoff says when the manuscript of The Four Corners of the Heart was found, he “didn’t dream for an instant that this work might one day be published, far less that it might be the object of this level of public attention”, partly because his mother’s books “had hardly been selling at all” just before the manuscript was found.

In addition, her poor health and her “many entanglements with the tax office and the law” meant she was “gradually isolated from the outside world, drawn away from friends, beyond the reach of her editors and away from the ‘Paris scene’ in general”, says Westhoff.

Éditions Plon published the book, under its French title Les Quatre coins du coeur, in 2019. Westhoff has made some changes to his mother’s text, including removing “certain paragraphs which were no more than reiterations of substantially similar preceding passages”, and taking out “a fairly long section describing Henri Cresson’s wife, which did not match in the least with the character described everywhere else in the book”.
The novel, Westhoff admits, “brings nothing particularly new, nor anything exceptional” to Sagan’s body of work.
“Having said this,” he adds, “the novel remains a unique, singular and unmistakably integral element of the oeuvre of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers and, as such, it demands to be read.”

サガンは生前に30点以上の作品（そのうち長篇小説は20点）を上梓しているのに、いまだに『悲しみよこんにちは』の作家として語られている；

Richard Williams*4 “Françoise Sagan: 'She did what she wanted'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/28/francois-sagan-bonjour-tristesse

悲しみよこんにちは (新潮文庫サ 2-1)

作者:フランソワーズサガン
新潮社

Amazon

*2:See Agence France-Presse "'Lost' Françoise Sagan novel causes stir in France" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/19/francoise-sagan-lost-novel-france-four-corners-heart

*3:http://www.westhoff-images.net/ See eg. Gaby Levin "Rhapsody to My Bohemian Mother, Francoise Sagan" https://www.haaretz.com/2012-07-27/ty-article/rhapsody-to-my-bohemian-mother/0000017f-f084-df98-a5ff-f3ad381e0000 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Westhoff