User:Charbar2001/The Heart-Keeper

The Heart-Keeper is a French novel published in 1968 by Françoise Sagan.

Summary
The attractive and wiskey-swilling screenwriter, Dorothy Seymour narrates the novel. In her forties, Dorothy is relatively disillusioned with the Hollywood world she finds herself in. This doesn't stop her from asserting her right to futility and pointless escapism in the face of Lewis's pretensions to the absolute. She takes the strange young man in after he throws himself under the wheels of the Jaguar, driven by her boyfriend Paul. The young man, little by little takes an increasing, even invasive role in her life due to the inordinate tenderness he shows her. Once his leg is healed, she decides to force him to become independent from her, shaping him into a fantastic leading man.

Admittedly, it's an easy task, given Lewis's unreal beauty: green eyes, feline features, brown hair and bewitching charm. Nevertheless, having become an actor who needs no one is not enough to prevent him from surrounding her with tender, violent solicitude. He lets her live her life, accepts Paul without even wanting to fight. But he refuses in every way that she might have to suffer; every way, including the worst. A strange relationship develops between Dorothy and her keeper of her heart. Lewis's radical demand for purity is undoubtedly at odds with Dorothy's conciliatory approach to life, its pleasures and men, but they are drawn together by a similar kind of sad youth and disillusionment, generosity and childlike attitudes. They also have amorality in common: a global and unconscious amorality in Dorothy's case, and a strategic amorality, we might say, where there is an absolute submission of means to ends, in Lewis's case.

Paul Brett, the third character, is the epitome of a normal man. A stranger to this relationship, he doesn't really understand it, but after all, he loves Dorothy too.

Themes
This novel takes up many of the themes dear to Sagan. However, the narrator is older than the narrator of Bonjour tristesse, and the world of young teenagers discovering life, love, play and reality is less evoked here. Sagan is fifteen years older too. The author's identification with her narrator, frequently noted in her work, is still present in this novel. The heroine has remained the same: a pretty woman, strong in her power of seduction and fond of using it, with a penchant for whisky and a blurred morality, of which she is well aware. The strange and vaguely impossible loves between people separated by twenty years or so are present again, as is the easy, glossy life.