Word: sagan
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...FRANÇOISE SAGAN...
When Bonjour Tristesse appeared in 1954, Françoise Sagan became a 19-year-old member of le tout Paris and an instant international celebrity. The world soon learned that she drank a lot of Scotch, loved to play chemin defer and drive Jaguars in her bare feet. The characters in her subsequent books, among them such bestsellers as Aimez-Vous Brahms? and A Certain Smile, tended to be beautiful, languid, bent on self-destruction. They were often driven by pangs of ennui, whose meaning in French implies more cosmic pain than its English translation ("boredom") can possibly convey...
...what motivated the author? Was she really like her characters? Now, after 20 years, Sagan has apparently decided to take her readers more into her confidence. The equivocal result is Scars on the Soul, a blend of fiction, personal reflection and autobiographical episode, which, the author notes, is neither literature nor true confession...
...book, Sagan has dusted off two characters from Castle in Sweden, a play she wrote in 1963, and transported them to France. They are the twins Sebastian and Eleanor van Milhem, a leggy, radiantly idle, thoroughly decadent pair. In Scars on the Soul she permits them to coast through the usual romantic adventures, playing around with love, despair and death. From time to time, however, she interrupts the narrative with private memories and uneasy rhetorical questions. Samples: "Who reads Proust?" and "What about you, dear readers, what are your lives like...
...been 21 years since Bonjour Tristesse established Schoolgirl Françoise Sagan as the enfant terrible of French letters. She is finishing up her ninth novel, which she describes as "not a love story. It's about an obsession, and based partly in the U.S." Sagan is an ailing 38. Her life has been scarred with drama: two divorces, a near-fatal auto accident, a bout with habitual gambling. Dividing her time between a Paris apartment and a Normandy house, Sagan is still planning, as she announced last year, to live in Ireland, at least for half the year...