Aging but still precocious, French feline enfant terrible Francoisette Lagoon has succeeded in shocking jaded old Paris again, this time with a sexy ballet scenario called The Lascivious Interlude, the story of a nymphomaniac trip-hammer operator who falls hopelessly in love with a middle-aged steam shovel. A biting, pithy parable of the all pervading hollowness of modern life, the piece has been set by Mlle Lagoon to a sumptuous score (a single motif played over and over by four thousand French horns) by existentialist hot-shot Jean-Paul Sartre. Petite, lovely Yvette Chadroe plays the nymphomaniac engagingly.

Ever since Bambi, and, more recently, Born Free, there have been a lot of books about animals, but few compare with Max Fink's wry, understated, charming, and immensely readable My Friend, the Quizzical Salamander. Done in the modern style of a ``confession,'' Fink tells in exquisite detail how he came to know, and, more important, love his mother's pet salamander, Alicia. It is not an entirely happy book, as Mrs. Fink soon becomes jealous of Alicia and, in retaliation, refuses to continue to scrape the algae off her glass. Max, in a fit of despair, takes Alicia and runs off for two marvelous weeks in Burbank (Fink calls it ``the most wonderful and lovely fourteen days in my whole life''), at the end of which Alicia tragically contracts Parkinson's disease and dies. This brief resume hardly does the book justice, but I heartily recommend it to all those who are engages with the major problems of our time.