Word: sagan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...CHAMADE by Francoise Sagan. 156 pages. Button...
Franchise Sagan is a Gallic Maugham who knows instinctively how deep to probe, what not to say, and when to quit. Her swift vignettes, like Maugham's, are the product of a far more complex and searching intelligence than cold type exposes, and her novels are like fragile sand dollars-elegant, delicate designs...
...could only happen in Sagan's Paris. When la chamade begins to pulse through Lucile and Antoine, Clare taps out her surrender and Charles shrewdly retreats. Lucile leaves Charles for her new lover and makes an earnest effort to mend her indolent ways, but holding a job and living in one room are too boring a price to pay for love. When she gets pregnant, it is Charles who supplies the abortion fee; and when she quits her struggle for an independent life, it is Charles who gives her back...
...Sagan knows how to play with the nuances of worldly boredom and the despairing thrusts of passion. Of her seven novels, La Chamade is one of the best and as perceptive as Bonjour, Tristesse. She has added another documentation to her reputation as a precise miniaturist who lucidly fosters a fond romantic delusion-that the French are so tough and realistic that they can be rational even about love...
Aging Well. All the while, Sagan kept writing, turning out a play or novel a year, and gradually earning the respect of the French literary community. Andre Maurois, for example, wrote of her "sober, elliptical" style and her "remarkable economy of means," added sagaciously: "The tone of Sagan fits our times...