Word: sagan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...event was something of a milestone. It marked the beginning of the most sophisticated search yet for evidence of intelligent life in the vast realms of space beyond the earth. Under a pledge of $120,000 from the Planetary Society, an organization of space advocates begun by Astronomer Carl Sagan (Cosmos), Horowitz and his colleagues will be scanning the heavens for the next four years. They hope to pick up some orderly signal, besides the chaotic noise of the stars, that would indicate that E.T. (for extraterrestrial) is not just a Hollywood fantasy...
FICTION: Bech Is Back, John Updike George Mills, Stanley Elkin Ironweed. William Kennedy ∙ On the Black Hill, Bruce Chatwin ∙ The Painted Lady, Françoise Sagan Shiloh and Other Stories, Bobbie Ann Mason
...critical chorus, that she wasted her talent on such trivial themes and frivolous characters. That argument reflected the reverse snobbism of intellectuals who were unwilling to grant that the rich and the worldly were worthy of a novelist's attention, as if there had been no Proust. Sagan defended herself: "I have always made my characters belong to the same social group, out of decency. I've never known poverty; I don't see why I should try to make a living talking about social problems I've never experienced and know nothing about...
Criticism of her fiction stepped up after 1972, when Sagan reportedly began battling spells of illness, and her novels grew skimpier and more vulnerable to attack. In 1981 she was devastated when a French court banned her twelfth novel, a 178-page crime story called Le Chien Couchant (The Setter), on the ground that it was an "illicit reproduction" of a short story by another writer. The ban was later reversed on appeal...
...Painted Lady, wrought out of a decade of travail, long silences and undoubted artistic growth, comes as a reassuring surprise. A tale of loves won and lost on a ten-day Mediterranean cruise, The Painted Lady is more than entertaining; its verve and humor disguise a serious work. Sagan's cruise has a musical motif; the deluxe passengers have each paid $15,000 to listen to a virtuoso pianist and a celebrated diva perform aboard a ship pointedly christened Narcissus. The lure is also gastronomical: "The port of call determined the musical work, and the musical work determined...