A novel by the French author Françoise Sagan has been published posthumously – but, despite the suggestion that a novelist such as Leïla Slimani or Anne Berest might finish it, it has been published in its incomplete state.
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, and ends on a cliffhanger. Sagan says in 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.
Sagan is best known for her short novel Bonjour Tristesse, which is told by 17-year-old Cécile, holidaying on the Côte d’Azur with her widowed father, who has brought along his young girlfriend. Sagan wrote the novel when she was 18, and it caused a disturbance in French society and brought notoriety to its author.
It remained her most well-known work, despite Sagan writing 20 novels, three volumes of short stories, nine plays, two biographies and several collections of nonfiction pieces over the course of her career.
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 Stock, the publisher which reissued Sagan’s works in France, passed on publishing The Four Corners of the Heart. It was when another publisher, Éditions Plon, “got wind of the existence of this unpublished novel and communicated its interest in publishing it and so making it available to the world” that Westhoff decided to see if it could be published.
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.”
• The Four Corners of the Heart by Françoise Sagan is published by Amazon Crossing (£6.99)
