Fairy Tale for Today's Lotus-eaters:
CANTARELLA, HELENE
Shimon Wincelberg has written for The New Yorker. Punch. Commentary. Story and various other publications. Fairy Tale for Today's Lotus-Eaters Bunjour Tristesse. By Francoise Sagan. Dutton....
...Raymond, to whom she is linked by what at times appears to be a somewhat unorthodox and overpossessive amitie amoureuse...
...They are living a giddy life on the French Riviera when Anne, who had been the best friend of Cecile's dead mother, comes to visit them...
...Yet there is so much genuine talent here, such a sure grasp of the material, so many flashing insights into the springs of human behavior, particularly that of jealous adolescents, that the story takes on a dimension of its own and lives in its own right...
...When Anne accepts and sets about injecting order and some sort of intellectual discipline into their disordered life...
...For one thing, the psychological climate is false...
...The "Princess" is 17-year-old Cecile...
...No woman of her stature and attainments could be so quickly destroyed...
...Hence the haunting title, taken from the lovely poem of Eluard...
...Reviewed by Helene Cantarella Former chief...
...Let us hope that Mademoiselle Sagan will survive the cataclysmic success of her book and that she will be able to resist the temptation to write too much too soon...
...It is hard to say...
...Unlike those of the past which were conceived in the main by adults for the delectation of the young, this one was tossed off for grown-ups by a teenage girl during a summer of idleness...
...128 pp...
...The "Prince" is not the usual youth on horseback, but Cecile's youngish debonair widower father...
...Yet one cannot help thinking that the novel's success is out of all proportion to its real merits...
...They move in the magical nevernever land of fashionable Riviera resorts where life is an effortless golden dream...
...at times, it is impossible not to think of Colette...
...2.50...
...It might not survive the stampede that is on...
...Hers is a delicate talent...
...Her beauty, intelligence and wisdom conquer Raymond, who proposes marriage...
...Can the answer lie in the fact that, surfeited by the increasingly frightening complexities of everyday life in our atomic age...
...These are serious basic flaws, and...
...The threat to their blissful entente is a potential step-mother, the handsome Parisian dress-designer Anne, as strong-minded and purposeful as father and daughter are pleasureloving and aimless...
...She plays her cards with such wanton guile that Anne is driven to suicide...
...It is perhaps not cricket to pick a fairy tale to pieces, particularly one that seems to have given so much delight to so many...
...Of course, there are traces of Raymond Radiguet, that other immensely gifted young French writer who analyzed so deftly the delicate, complex and sometimes tragic torments of adolescents awash in the emotional tides of adult life...
...Anne is too easily duped and outwitted...
...There is no facet of his life which is not known to her...
...Cecile has for two years been her father's constant companion...
...This is life seen through the abstracted eyes of a daydreaming jeune fille bien elevee who has cast herself in the leading role of the femme fatale as she plays at grown-ups...
...The peril thus averted, Cecile's life closes over the episode, leaving no trace in her soul beyond a vague remorse tempered by a sweet sadness, no more disturbing than the whiff of a tantalizing perfume...
...The fact remains that the book has held countless thousands spellbound the world over...
...Cecile senses the danger and pits against her the younger, vital and earthy mistress whom Anne had replaced...
...Foreign Language Review Section, 0WI Motion Picture Bureau THIS IS a contemporary fairy tale, slick, sophisticated, and with a measure of enchantment to boot...
...while they can be explained on the ground of the author's extreme youth, they make it hard to understand the universal uncritical enthusiasm that has catapulted pert little Francoise Sagan to the dizzying pinnacles of international notoriety and fortune...
...readers have everywhere turned with relief and gratitude to this simple, charming but basically inconsequential book—to identify themselves with these contemporary lotus-eaters who, removed from the content of modern life and its problems, can turn inward upon themselves and concentrate on their own little private worlds where nothing more pressing impinges than the delights and torments that stem from the interplay of passions a la stature de l'homme...
...For another...
...All the expected stock characters appear, but in the slightly distorted form that one might expect from the pen of an exceptionally precocious and perceptive modern adolescent who has patterned them to fit her own special world of wish-fulfilment...
...just out of boarding school and on the threshold of adventurous adulthood...
...She sees him as he is and loves him for it...
...Out of these timehallowed and commonplace elements, Francoise Sagan has compounded in her first book a fresh and quite amoral little tale which gains in piquancy through the crystalline gallic simplicity of its style...
Vol. 38 • May 1955 • No. 22
