A Sport and a Pastime
By James Salter
- Release Date: 2012-06-05
- Genre: Literary Fiction
Description
The astonishing novel and “tour de force” about a love affair in postwar France from the iconic author of All That Is (The New York Times Book Review).
Twenty-year-old Yale dropout Phillip Dean is traveling Europe aimlessly in a borrowed car with little money. When he stops for a few days in a church-quiet town near Dijon, he meets Anne-Marie Costallat, a young shop assistant. The two begin an affair both carnal and innocent, and she quickly becomes to him the real France, its beating heart and an object of pure longing.
James Salter, author of Light Years and the memoir Burning the Days, was an essential voice in the evolution of late twentieth-century prose, a stylist on par with Updike and Roth who won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his collection Dusk and Other Stories. One of the first great American novels to speak frankly of human desire free of guilt and shame, A Sport and a Pastime inspired Reynolds Price to call it “as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know.”
This ebook edition features an illustrated biography of James Salter including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
Reviews
100 Words or Less
1By JRubinoI thought maybe I had a brain hemorrhage. I read, but had no grasp of the scene or characters or plot. Somehow nothing was sticking together. Then I realized it wasn’t my poor misused brain. It was the writing style. Salter detests complete sentences. Paragraphs are pieces of observations or memories but strung together as a narrative. This can work beautifully for short scenes. But for page after page it’s exhausting. It’s annoying. It’s incomprehensible. Once in a while comes a writer who is so enamored with technique that the entirety of the novel suffers. Salter is a perfect example.
