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Title: A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel
ISBN: 0374530505
Author:
James Salter
Publicate Date: 2006-08-22
Publish: 2006-08-22
List Price: $13.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $7.33
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $5.84
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.40
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Recommended
Dean is an American college dropout visiting France and who meets the narrator through a social dinner. The story focuses on Dean's relationship with a young French woman and on the narrator, who remains quite an outsider but totally in awe of Dean. This book is atmospheric and haunting. Salter beautifully describes the France of small towns through the eyes of a foreigner and the whole atmosphere just adds to the desperation and loneliness of the narrator.
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2: Floating through words
I read this book a few years ago as a young, wide-eyed college student. Recently, with more experience (both literary and in life) I've come to it again and I'm still amazed by Salter's ability to put me into a trance. I can see a little bit of the Hemingway influence that people have pointed out (and I believe Salter himself has listed E.H. as an influence), but more than anything else, I see this novel as owing a debt to "The Great Gatsby," with it's unreliabilty and dazzling lights.
Salter's language is not perfect throughout, his style falters for brief moments, but for most of the novel it is nearly impeccable. The unnammed narrator is one of the greatest (and maybe the most) unreliable narrator of all time, starting in the second chapter with the words "None of this is true. I've said Autun, but it could easily have been Auxerre. I'm sure you'll come to realize that. I am only putting down details which entered me, fragments that were able to part my flesh. It's a story of things that never existed although even the faintest doubt of that, the smallest possibility, plunges everything into darkness. I only want whoever reads this to be as resigned as I am. There's enough passion in the world already. Everything trembles with it. Not that I believe it shouldn't exist, no, no, but this is only a thin, relfecting sliver which somehow keeps catching the light."
One of the most common criticisms of the book is its erotic, nearly pornographic, content. To some I would say that it's worth the possiblity of being offended (or merely shocked or even aroused) just to experience the pure beauty of Salter's prose. To others I would point out the historical context of the novel. After Grove Press won the right to import and sell D.H. Lawerence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" American novels across the spectrum were, and many still are, saturated with sexual content. Salter, more than any other writer I've read (and I've read a a lot) deals with sex in a manner that is almost too poetic to be real but too grounded to be surreal.
In the introduction to this particular edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006), Duke University Professor and acclaimed novelist Reynolds Price argues that this novel "is as nearly perfect a narrative as I've encountered in English-language letters, a more brilliant and heartbreaking portrayal of young sexual intoxication than I've found elsewhere, and an unbroken exercise of prose that leaves me proud of my native language and of a fearless man who labored to lay it out with such useful opulence." I can't help but agree.
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3: Eloquent and erotic.
The writing is lovely. Salter strings together words in a refreshing and clean style. The story itself didn't grab me the way I had hoped it would after reading previous reviews. It's not so much a love story as it is a lust story and as such it never quite gets off the ground. Perhaps because it was written 40 years ago and nowadays we are so inundated with graphic sex scenes that those in the book failed to titillate as no doubt they were intended, although I still found them somewhat alluring.
The two lovers (Dean and Anne-Marie) characters are never fully realized so I didn't feel any emotional connection to them (and I'm unsure if they felt any emotional connection to each other).
I enjoyed the vagueness of the narrator. Everything is described by him, as though he were imagining what the young lovers were doing, so the line between reality and fantasy was so blurred that the reader is left unsure as to what actually transpired behind closed doors, which is perhaps the point.
Absolutely worth reading thanks to the languorous language.
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4: Objectification as Art
Salter has an incredible sensuous style, so I'm giving this three stars because I just like how he puts the words together on the page. But for me this books feels utterly dated. It was apparently written in the 1960's and it shows -- disaffected American (Dean) hangs out in France, has lots of erotic yet completely emotionally unfulfilling sex. No one communicates very deeply with anyone, nothing seems to have a point and of course it all ends badly. I suspect it seems much more meaningful if you are a certain sex (not mine) and beyond a certain age.
The sex (did I mention there's lots of it?) is vividly described yet weirdly depressing. Why? Maybe it's because I'm a woman and the woman in this story is treated as an absolute object. There is no real effort made to get into her head, and she appears to exist solely to be a docile receptacle for Dean's sperm. For all the emotional involvement our hero feels for her, he might as well have just bought an inflatable doll. So yeah, I find that kind of depressing.
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5: A Thrill and a Seduction
This book set me spinning in dilemna trying to decide whether to devour or to savor each of leaf of this luscious novel. It's so delicious it drove me crazy wondering if I should have taken it all at once or milked it nice and slow to last me forever. James Salter can do this to a girl. Seductive and poetic prose fills the lines with the most evocative imagery I've seen in a long, long time. Just be ready for that cold shower, if you know what I mean. It's subtly spicy from the start, with language so intriguing it's impossible not to fall in love -- unless you are totally out of touch with your own sensuality -- or unless you hate the French, which is of course a common sentiment in many political climates. But the novel is not about the French, only the language of love that the French so enjoy.
Keep an open mind and be delightfully thrilled and seduced by the world and the characters created here.
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