In an age of French literature where the philosophically rich fictions of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Malraux were succeeded by the formal innovations of the New Novel, the enormous success of Françoise Sagan's fragile,...

A REVIEW OF TWO RECENT SAGAN BIOGRAPHIES DURING THE FINAL QUARTER OF THE 20TH CENTURY, Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was the world's most prominent scientist. He well deserves the two long, narrative biographies that have just appeared by well-known science writers William Poundstone...

WE MOVED OFFICES, AND I BEGAN TO purge files, stuff I don't need and haven't looked at in years. Digging deep, I came across a fat file marked "Sagan." The astronomer died in December 1996. Save? Throw away? From the documents, a...

Sex is not absent from Aimez-vous Brahms…. But although the love affairs in which its characters are involved lie at the very heart of the book, one can hardly construe their lovemaking as hedonistic frolic…. [It] is clear that Françoise Sagan, unlike a Roger Vailland, has never been interested in the erotic schemes of sexual play: what love, or lovemaking, represents in her books is the cravings and despairs of the human heart. In Brahms as in the earlier novels, but more clearly than ...

[It] seems to me it need not trouble us that Françoise Sagan's books resemble one another as much as they do. We know that the obsession with material, the compulsion to rearrange a few simple elements in the hope that some final illumination will burst forth from them, is the compulsion of the artist. We recognize that the thin line is her form, as it was Giacommetti's, and that she reaches for it again and again. It is her problem to make each book new, though she chooses not to add t...

Deft, spare, understated, subtle, disciplined, classic—these are the words critics have used to praise the novels of Françoise Sagan. She possessed to an uncommon degree, they said, the typically French flair for nuance. She could sketch in a character in a gesture, immortialize him or her in a line or two of dialogue. Her sentences were as well shaped as a Chanel suit. She dealt in essences, light and sensuous as a perfume. National pride preened itself on her, anxious to compare her to Colet...