Bonjour Bernhardt

Press, 22 July 1989, Page 23

Bonjour Bernhardt

Dear Sarah Bernhardt. By Francoise Sagan. Macmillan 1989. 232 pp. $34.95. (Reviewed by Margaret Quigley)

Which of us in the generation who were in their late ’teens when Francoise Sagan’s first novel “Bonjour Tristesse” burst on to the literary scene like a meteor will forget the impact that book made on us in our impressionable years? It shot immediately to the top of the bestseller lists throughout the world, but, like a meteor, its brilliance was short-

lived and a re-reading of it today makes one wonder what all the fuss was about. In the 30 years since, Francoise Sagan has published “Aimez-Vous Brahms?”, written scripts for theatre and television, composed lyrics for songs, and has now produced a third book, “Dear Sarah Bernhardt” (the original French title is “Sarah Bernhardt: Le rire incassable.”) It is a book that defies pigeonholing into any one category, for while Sagan

may have begun it with the idea of writing a biography of the great actress, her originality has lead her to cast it in an unusual form. The dust-jacket describes it as “her latest and probably most innovative work of fiction,” but although undeniably a work of the imagination

it is not a novel in any accepted sense. It takes the form of an exchange of letters from the dead Sarah Bernhardt

lying in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise and the modern novelist living in present-day France. This epistolary form frees Sagan from the necessity of much biographical convention (actual events of Bernhardt’s life are never more than briefly mentioned) and allows her to try to convey an unfettered impression of that extraordinary character.

This is probably the best and ultimate aim of biography and Sagan achieves it to the extent that the reader gains a vivid impression of a brilliant personality. But the book is inconsistent and the basic artificiality of the device often grates, as too do Sagan’s frequent but irrelevant pronouncements on the evils of modern society, her references to her own life, and the expressions of mutual admiration between the two women.

Possibly, what reads well in the original French seems somewhat arch and coy in translation. “Dear Sarah Bernhardt” is a bold experiment in mixing biography, autobiography, and imaginative fiction, but it is an experiment which is not entirely successful.