Word: sagan
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...past two decades, radio astronomers in the U.S. and abroad, especially the Soviet Union, have conducted dozens of such searches. None have picked up the slightest hint of a signal that might have been given off by a distant planetary civilization orbiting a remote star. Indeed, even diehards like Sagan are forced to concede that there is not a scintilla of hard scientific evidence that life of any kind exists on far-off worlds. But the search efforts so far have admittedly been slapdash, concentrating on only small parts of the sky and tuning in to just...
WHEN FRANCOISE SAGAN, the celebrated French novelist, was hospitalized in the late 1970s for what turned out to be merely an intestinal obstruction, few of her readers probably thought her writing or her attitudes towards life and love would be changed much. The fast living author of Bonjour Tristesse, a tremendous bestseller in 1954 when she was only 18, had, for 25 years, writer, only of the rich and the worldly suffering through disillusionment and failed love...
...ordeal of facing possible death (when she was hospitalized. Sagan believed she had cancer) seems to have changed her writing greatly-indeed far more than a near fatal car accident which put her in a coma for three days when she was 20. The Painted Lady, just translated into English, bears little resemblance in form or outlook to her earlier 12 novels...
...SAGAN'S STYLE in The Painted Lady differs sharply from her previous works. Gone is the simple narrative. Here she writes in a much richer descriptive style. One finds few of the short, direct remarks which carried her first books, such as the narrator's comment in Bonjour Tristesse that." They were both smiling happily, and I was very much impressed, for happiness has always seemed to me a great achievement." Instead, Sagan indulges in profuse description, as when Clarisse rains kisses on Julien's face; "Julien felt his face open up, become a fertile and blessed land, a gentle...
...fact, Sagan's whole outlook on life and love seems to have changed. Love in her previous novels appeared as perfect yet infinitely elusive, a cure-all which could not be temporary. Now, now-ever, love does triumph, at least for two of the characters, and lasting happiness appears attainable. This is refreshing, yet somehow forced. Sagan has been criticized in the past for taking on too pessimistic a view of life and love, and now seems too eager to refute the charge...