Look, Moi, I'm Dancing

By Helen Rogan

SCARS ON THE SOUL

by FRANC,OISE SAGAN

141 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

When Bonjour Tristesse appeared in 1954, Franc,oise 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.

But 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.

For the 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?"

Sagan can still write gracefully about solitude, imagination and love. But it is hard to care very much that she feels modern life is "truly unacceptable to any civilized person." One possibly inadvertent revelation is notable. The book shows a constant, dismal preoccupation with the author's public image. Like her characters, she is unvaryingly selfconscious, whether gloomy or skittish ("Tm raving and talking nonsense, but so what!"). Early on, Franc,oise Sagan confides: "I even doubt whether I'll show this to my publisher." There was merit in that doubt.

Helen Rogan

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.