Short takes

The late Françoise Sagan, a name redolent of Gauloises and chagrin d'amour, speaks to us across four decades of changing manners and mores in this new translation of her 1965 novel "La Chamade" by Douglas Hofstadter, a best-selling author in his own right.

When Lucile, who is being kept by a wealthy older man, meets Antoine, who is being kept by a wealthy older woman, at a sophisticated Parisian soirée, the result is instant infatuation. It will go nowhere, the gossips shrug. Lucile is too fond of luxury to leave a rich lover for a poor one. She proves them wrong, at first. But the walls of Antoine's meager digs, so romantic as the site of their defiant trysts, begin to close in on her once she moves in with him, and we see that the luxury she misses most unbearably is irresponsibility - the freedom to be and do nothing.

Appended to the novel back to back is "Translator, Trader," an engaging novella-length note by Hofstadter, whose main innovation in an otherwise seamless rendering of the novel is to capitalize "You" to indicate the formal French vous, with the bizarre effect of suggesting that Sagan's characters are praying.

NOTES ON SONTAG
By Phillip Lopate
Princeton University, 256 pp., $19.95

Phillip Lopate first met Susan Sontag in the early 1960s at Columbia University, where he was an undergraduate and she, not much older, was already a faculty superstar, a celebrity intellectual. Over the years, as their paths kept crossing, he continued to admire her. Here he addresses with sure-handed familiarity the life, the work, and the charisma of the woman he calls "the high priestess of seriousness."

As Lopate recounts, after growing up in Los Angeles, a place she scorned, Sontag settled in New York, but her sensibility kept traveling eastward until it came to rest among the more recherché thinkers of European modernism. She was an intellectual omnivore, an auteur of ponderous fiction and film as well as a critic prepared to pronounce on global politics, art and culture both highbrow and low, illness personal and metaphorical, even criticism itself.

Seeress of an earnest generation - whether visiting North Vietnam or analyzing New Wave cinema - she seemed less secure, says Lopate, as American culture grew ever more ironic and self-referential. Her own later writings even quarreled with her earlier ones. Lopate lucidly addresses all that was most brilliant about this iconic figure and all that was most maddening.

A GIRL’S GUIDE TO MODERN
EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
By Charlotte Greig
Other, 288 pp., paperback, $14.95

This intriguingly titled novel carries us back to Ye Olde Swinging England, circa 1970, those bygone days of bell-bottoms and non-portable telephones. Susannah Jones, the "girl" in question, is a university student haphazardly studying philosophy while actually majoring in boyfriends. Though living with Jason, a thirtyish antiques dealer with a full - in fact, a too full - life outside their relationship, she takes up with a fellow student, Rob, less experienced but more enthusiastic in the sack. Susannah's discovery that she is pregnant only exposes the unsuitability of either possible father as a long-term marital prospect.

What to do? When Susannah expresses doubts about an abortion, her girlfriends bristle: They're budding feminists with worlds to conquer before parenthood. But neither can Susannah envision life as an unwed mother back in her censorious Welsh hometown. Where others in her predicament might consult a contemporary oracle for guidance - astrology, say, or "Our Bodies, Our Selves" - Susannah turns to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It's a premise that suggests a kooky comedy of manners. That prospect fizzles out, though, in soggy "will she or won't she" melodrama that makes both Susannah and the '70s less distinctive than they ought to be.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.