Word: sagan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...CERTAIN SMILE (128 pp.)-Françoise Sagan-Dutton...
...favorite pose of the very young is to abandon hope because they still have so much. One of the best-paid literary practitioners of this kind of premature despair is Paris' intellectual gamin, Françoise Sagan, just turned 21. As readers who pushed the sales of Bonjour Tristesse past the million mark know, Sagan wears her world-weary rue with a spicy difference. In her novels, sin triumphs over everything but syntax. This high-styled amorality led one French critic to sum up her work as "classicism in panties...
...Author Sagan is all set to repeat her success with A Certain Smile. More than 200,000 copies have been sold in France, and the U.S. publisher had 100,000 in print before publication. In Bonjour Tristesse, the teen-age heroine lived on cozy terms with her widowed father's succession of mistresses until he proposed to marry one, at which point the daughter showed her claws and drove the poor woman to suicide. A Certain Smile is only slightly less scandalous, and similarly concerned with Author Sagan's thirst for drinking at the fountain of eternal middle...
...somewhat spavined and haggard, a kind of walking ruin of a roué, and, of course, old enough to be Dominique's father. What makes their liaison inevitable is that they both fear the binding emotions of real love like a plague and hence, in Author Sagan's Sartrian thinking, respect each other's freedom. Both cherish isolated moments of intense sensation, encountered rather like chance oases in the desert journey of what they regard as life's everyday meaninglessness. After one passionate week on the Riviera stretches into two, Dominique finds that she cannot hand...
...covered-up singer in the business"), with her straight black hair hanging to her waist, she chanted the changes on blighted love, nostalgia and despair in a husky contralto which ranged from a whisper to a raucous shout. Such personages as François Mauriac and Françoise Sagan dashed off songs for her. Sartre wrote that "in her throat she has millions of poems not yet written." When she took to the stage (in Anastasia) in a straight dramatic role, Le Monde's Robert Kemp was entranced by her "dignity and poetry," found her "smashing...