Incidental Music: Stories

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Françoise Sagan is without a doubt France’s most celebrated storyteller, and in this collection of twelve tales we can well see why.

For one, she is of course an unabashed romantic, always recognizing the primacy of love and affect. Secondly, she controls these soundings into the depths of passion with a classically stylish prose and a wry detachment. While so many of today’s writers fall into despair, anxiety, or ennui, Sagan remains unfailingly amusing, humorous, even mocking. Some might call these twelve stories old-fashioned, and some of them will remind readers of a de Maupassant or an O. Henry. But they are also very modern in temperament.

Her range is broad: We visit nineteenth-century Germany for the highly irreverent “Aftermath of a Duel,” or puckish “Distant Cousin”; Naples under the Austrians in 1817 is the setting for “La Futura,” the story of an alluring woman who uses her charms and connections to ransom noble malefactors; and in “Partway Round the Course,” we are in the Detroit suburbs for a bittersweet parable about aging.

Most of the tales, however, are situated in Sagan’s natural habitat—the brittle, superficial, wealthy Paris where le snobisme has been raised to a courtly code. Her characters here are worldlings, each required by the laws of their class to preserve a decorous exterior in the face of bitterness and disappointment. And every story has a sudden, ironic twist. Sagan deftly illuminates the nuances at war beneath carefully maintained exteriors, where sincere emotion enters only obliquely. True love is rare and only seen, at that, in the past tense. It is the nature of human passion always to be fleeting, Sagan seems to be saying, but it is also its nature always to return.