[Aimez-vous Brahms …] is a calamitously bad book, and is being noted here only because it is by Françoise Sagan…. What we are witnessing is a complete breakdown of sensibility, which many writers must fear. What then had feeling is now mechanical; what then was art has now become a formula. And the formula by itself is not enough. Here we have our old friends, now characterless and pardonably fatigued: the middle-aged man, the refined woman of a certain age, the young slut. The man goes with the slut, the refined woman finds herself a young lover. The rest can be briefly summarised (for Mlle Sagan's art has so deteriorated that a synopsis of her plot is as good as her novel, and even better, because shorter). Man revolted by slut, longs for refined woman—woman longs for man, dismisses young lover—man meets woman—bed. Curtain. With...