Word: sagan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Manned spaceflight for its own sake is typical of NASA's thinking, argue critics of the agency. The function of the space program, says Astronomer Sagan, is "to put people up in tin cans in earth orbit and then bring them down again. People are going up in order to ... go up. It is a capability without a mission." Concludes Sagan: "We do not have a space program, if one assumes that a program has goals and purposes...
SALAD DAYS by Françoise Sagan...
Pity the genre novelist who embarks on a different course. For more than 25 years, Françoise Sagan has published brief, ironic tales of love lost or betrayed. She is a supremely confident writer, both in her resolute economy of style and in her command of the milieu she describes: the frivolous, overwrought bourgeois society where emotion can be both teased and indulged...
...France four years ago, has a radically different setting the working-class world of a grim little town outside Lille, and the author has been lectured by French critics for attempting it. She borrowed the plot from a 1965 short story by Jean Hougron, who brought suit against her; Sagan won the case on appeal. The outline is familiar maybe even a bit hoary: Gueret, a downtrodden bookkeeper, despised by his bosses and his landlady, stumbles upon a cache of jewels. They were lost in the course of a murder, which Gueret did not commit but Mme. Biron, the landlady...
...American publisher came up with a blithe title like Salad Days (the French title is Le Chien Couchant] for this predictable little morality tale is hard to figure out. Sagan is writing against her strength. She seems to have little access to these pinched minds, so that her customary grace notes-sly humor, sheer oddity-are rarely struck. But the story is told in sure-handed fashion, and it is flawlessly paced. Gueret at least is a convincing character, and the author takes an unexpectedly hearty interest in his clumsy pursuit of Mme. Biron. The French critics are doubtless right...