Some books I hear about through the loudspeakers of popular opinion (Harry Potter, Twilight, The Book Thief). Others are classics everybody has heard about (A Farewell to Arms, Les Miserables). Genre books I discover in dedicated forums and recently my wishlist is growing exponentially through Goodreads recommendations. But I always hold a special place on my shelves for the books I discover accidentally, like impulse buys in second hand bookstores that turn out to be personal favorites. A Sport and a Pastime came to me through the intercession of John Irving, who makes this slim 1967 volume an important part of the plot of his sprawling A Son of the Circus novel. In there, the James Salter intensely erotical account of the romance between Dean and Anne-Marie, a Yale dropout and a French waitress, serves to rekindle the passion of a tired middle aged couple.Given the explicit sexual content, the novel might not be for anyone, but I believe Salter treated the subject of physical love with an artist brush, stylishly and emotionally rather than mechanically. ( No sound from the countryside. Birds. The hum of a spring. On the wide bed they are soon at work, skillfully, silent as thieves. They are deep in a sumptuous dream in which they have discovered one another. ) The best references I could make to give you an idea of the particular vibe of the novel comes from cinema by way of the 'la nouvelle vague' French school (Alain Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard) and in particular Bernardo Bertolucci who also set out to shake the foundations of a stuck up, repressed society. 'The Last Tango in Paris' and 'The Dreamers' especially share with James Salter not only the French setting and the expatriate protagonist, but also the dreamy atmosphere, the enchanted circle that isolates the lovers from the concerns of the regular world. Some things, as I say, I saw, some discovered, and some dreamed, and I can no longer differentiate between them. But my dreams are as important as anything I acquired by stealth. More important, because they are the intuitive in its purest state. Without them, facts are no more than a kind of debris, unstrung, like beads. The dreams are as true and manifest as the iron fences of France flashing back in the rain. More true perhaps. They are the skeleton of all reality. The unnamed narrator of the story forms the third point of the triangle with the lovers, Dean and Anne-Marie. He is the writer who analyzes the situation, invents it and orders the sequence of events by whim or design. But he is also the voyeur who repeatedly confesses his own mysterious incapacity for physical love, an emotional handicap that he remedies by imagining the bed sports between the two young people. The title of the book could be simplistically interpreted to refer to the act of love, but the inside dedication with the quote from the Koran gives a more accurate and deeper meaning. None of this is true. I've said Autun, but it could easily have been Auxerre. I'm only putting down details which entered me, fragments that were able to part my flesh. [...] 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, reflecting sliver which somehow keeps catching the light. Autun is a name to conjure with in the case of James Salter. I would have loved the book to pieces even in the absence of the tempestuous love story, simply for the way the author paints in vibrant colours the beauty of the French countryside, the charms of small towns pver the changing seasons, the majesty of the Loire valley castles or the liberating expanses of the seaside resorts. Salter is not the first, nor the last American artist to fall in love with France and its culture, but he is one of the most convincing and authentic troubadours of the out of the way places, still authentic and unspoiled yet by the tourism industry, at least in the 1960's. Autun, still as a churchyard. Tile roofs, dark with moss. The amphitheatre. The great, central square: the Champ de Mars. Now, in blue of autumn that touches the bone. The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four - the years turn dry as leaves. The transitions between the narrator and the lovers perspectives are intentionally blurred, emotions are more important than facts, dreams are confused with memories and places (villages, towns, an endless series of anonimous hotel rooms ) become interchangeable, the only constant being the passion between Dean and Anne-Marie.So let's look more closely at them. When I think of Dean, I picture a young Robert Redford, a sun god, and of the phrase used to describe him in The Way We Were : 'In a way, he was like the country he was born in. Everything came too easy to him.' Dean is careless of his gifts (youth, beauty, intelligence, a privileged social position) and abandons his studies at Yale, drifting to France without money and without any plans for the future. He comes to Autun on a visit to the narrator, and here he meets a young waitress, unsophisticated, unschooled and from a very modest family. Anne-Marie maintains her 'je ne sais quoi', her feminine impenetrable mystery that is actually a more profound and dependBle capacity for love. Dean casually seduces her, she placidly accepts his attentions (none of them is a virgin) and they start to meet every weekend in different towns, in cheap hotel rooms.The biggest part of the novel develops as a double roadtrip: the exploration of the French countryside and the exploration of each other's body, experimenting and daring further and further afield with each new weekend. As a symbol of the transient character of the romance there is the luxury convertible driven by Dean, a Delahaye coupe that is revealed in the novel's endnotes to be the same car the author glimpsed in a Paris dealership window in his own youth, and the car he actually bought later in life: And I think the very symbol of his existence which continually appears and reappears to me, emerging from behind trees in the dusk, its lights floating out, its dark shape fleeing along the road, that great, spectral car which haunts the villages, its tires worn, the chrome on its wheels beginning to speckle with rust. Journeys and intimations of journeys - I see now that he has always kept himself close to the life that flows, is transient, born away. And I see his whole appearance differently. He is joined to the brevity of things. He has apprehended at least one great law. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this book that I expect many readers will judge trashy and pretentious, and my final rating makes no claims of objectivity. My reactions and my reasons to add it among favorites have a lot to do with personal experiences, both in falling in love with Paris and the French countryside over frequent holidays in the region and in more intimate / illicit journeys of discovery in similar hotel rooms and far away places. The flames of passion are burning with a quieter flame now, but the memories came back as if it all happened yesterday. The final lines of the novel hit closer to home than I expected: I am both Dean and the voyeuristic narrator of my own youth. I am left alone at my table - I always imagine this - watching as they turn and pass through the domed room, among the lighted cases, and at last are gone. Unknown lovers. They disappear into the town.
Игра и забава: Еротичният роман, който няма да ви е срам да чететеНе си спомням какво очаквах, когато започнах да чета "Игра и забава" на Джеймс Солтър. Може би нищо. Може би очаквах, че няма да ми хареса и ще я хвърля на купчината с изоставени книги. Изглеждаше като еротичен роман, занимаващ се с поредната авантюра на американец във Франция. И книгата донякъде е точно това, но за пореден път осъзнавам колко е важен стилът и подходът към даден материал. На този свят можеш да пишеш за каквото си искаш, въпросът е как ще го представиш по интересен начин, за да изглежда ново.Няма кой знае каква история. Както вече казах, един американец пътува из френската провинция. Романът започва с влак и свършва с влак. Пристигане и заминаване."Септември. Тези знойни дни като че ли никога няма да свършат. Градът, опразнен през август, започва отново да се пълни. Възстановява се. Ресторантите пак отварят врати, магазините също. Хората се връщат от провинцията, от морето, от пътувания по задръстени от коли шосета. На гарата е блъсканица. Деца, кучета. семейства със стари куфари, пристегнати с колани. Проправям си път сред тях. Все едно съм в тунел. Накрая излизам на ослепителния quai (перон), остъкленият покрив усилва като лупа светлината."Вече може би добивате представа за стила на Солтър. Той е ударен, с кратки изречения, принуждава ви да четете бързо и в определено темпо, точно като влак. Това спомага за по-кинематографичното представяне на сцените. Авторът само ви посочва определени неща, а вие (или по-скоро подсъзнанието ви) решавате дали да им обърнете внимание, дали да ги съберете и да извлечете от тях съответното внушение.Първата част на романа напомня на "Великият Гетсби". Разказвачът навлиза в среда на богати и повърхностни хора, сред които намира един, който се откроява. Това е Филип Дийн - американец, с лъскава модерна кола, който е дошъл в провинцията на почивка, "за седмица-две". Двамата донякъде се съревновават, но разказвачът постепенно отстъпва и дава мястото на Дийн, на когото принадлежи втората половина на книгата. Там вече линиите преливат и започвате да се двоумите дали двамата не са всъщност един и същи човек.Любовната авантюра на Дийн и Ан Мари е особена. Тя го обожава, той не е сигурен какво прави и колко дълго ще продължи. Тя вижда в очите му това колебание и от самото начало читателят остава с усещането за обреченост. На този фон, Солтър описва еротичните сцени, които по никакъв начин не възбуждат. Те изпълват с тъга. Навън често вали, сумрачно е, а двамата любовници откриват утеха един в друг, но това не е красива утеха, тя е необходимост, която след време ще се изчерпи."Накрая, разбира се, настъпва третият етап, етапът на затварянето: човек трябва да започне да изтласква света, да затваря прозорците към него, тъй като вече няма сили да осмисля всичко в цялото му разтърсващо многообразие и тогава - но към този момент той като някой поет вече ще е преждевременно в гроба, - най-сетне се появява формата на живота, която набъбва като капка, готова да се отрони.""Игра и забава" ми донесе щастието, което единствено изненадата от качествената литература, открита не неподозирано място, може да донесе. Това е книга, почти съвършена в своето представяне на една страстна и обречена любов, на една ваканция, или както гласи оригиналното заглавие, на един "pastime". Солтър е майсторски разказвач, който не допуска излишни думи. Бих искал да прочета още негови книги. Моите адмирации към издателство "Лабиринт", които напук на посредствеността у нас, продължават да издават качествена литература. Блог за книги "Изумен": http://izumen.blogspot.com/2014/12/bl...
Do You like book A Sport And A Pastime (2006)?
NickD’s indictment needs no additional count, so I will only register this novel’s activation of a collegiate boredom, a tedium I associate with a curricular corpus of films—mostly French, half-remembered, all untitled—in which chance couplings play out in an atmosphere of languorous tension and momentous triviality, silences and shrugged ouis. But, much like the boredom of those films, the boredom of Dean and Anne-Marie’s liaison (as distinct from the narrator’s other activities, inventions and observations) becomes, with the passage of chapters, tolerable, even at times habitable under the bracing formal cool of Salter’s writing. I like to think that the composer Ned Rorem, an admirer of A Sport and a Pastime, found in Salter’s style what he found in Debussy and Ravel—“a sound paradoxically opulent and lean…sumptuous bones.” I also like that this novel, unlike, say, Guy Davenport’s Bordeaux-set “Some Lines of Virgil,” keeps aloof from sun-drenched sexual pastoral, the slicked and sweltering afternoon of the faun, and instead eroticizes a wintry drizzly France. Salter gives us an erotics of refuge, of shelter—strangers driven into each other’s warmth: It’s a bitter night. Flats of rain are passing. Heavy drops ring in the gutter outside their window, but they are in a dovecote, they are pigeons beneath the eaves. The rain is falling all around them. Deep in feathers, breathing softly, they lie. His sperm swims slowly inside her, oozing out between her legs.This is the first book I’ve reviewed but not rated. Awareness of its longueurs and indifference to its lovers cannot cancel the afterglow of its style, or the faint itch to read it again.As for the car, it's a curious thing--it's registered in the name of Pritchard, 16 bis rue Jardin, and they know him. He's off in Greece for the summer, they think, but they'll handle that, too. Perhaps. It's parked under the trees near the house and locked, but like an old man fading, it has already begun crumbling before one's eyes. The tires seem smooth. There are leaves fallen on the hood, the whitened roof. Around the wheels one can detect the first, faint discoloring of chrome. The leather inside, seen through windows which are themselves streaked blue, is dry and cracked. There it sits, this stilled machine, the electric clock on the dash ticking unheard, slowly draining the last of life. And one day the clock is wrong. The hands are frozen. It is ended.
—Eric
This was my first experience of the recently deceased James Salter, who I have been meaning to read for a long time, the writer having been lauded by critics for many years. This novel is seen by many as the entry point to his work, and at 191 pages fitted the bill as a seemingly short read. I ended up reading the book twice, back to back, because I wasn't exactly sure what I thought of it the first time. The extra time invested was definitely worth it.The novel is narrated by an unnamed character, a US expat living in Paris, who takes advantage of his friends' house in Autun, a small town in provincial France, to work on his writing. Before leaving for the house, he is introduced to Philip Dean, a young, charming Yale dropout currently travelling in Europe, and after as few weeks, finds Dean at his door in a borrowed car, having decided to take advantage of the accommodation on his travels. While there, Dean falls in with a French shop assistant, Anne Marie Costallot, and they begin a passionate affair, much of which is conducted as they travel around the country together, and imagined by the narrator.Word of warning - this is an extremely steamy book - moreso than I thought it was going to be - but at the same time, it's far from the sort of writing that finds itself nominated for the bad sex awards each year. Erotic without being crass - it put me in mind of how an independent film maker might portray an affair in a black and white artsy film. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the whole novel is that kind of book, Salter creating a vivid picture of the French landscape throughout, and allowing us into the minds of each of the individual characters. The twist at the end, unexpected to me anyway, makes the story all the mote poignant.An excellent book on reflection, but a four star for me because it took me two reads to realise it fully. It's the sort of novel I can definitely see me returning to in future though, and I'll also be checking out the rest of Salter's back catalogue ion the strength of this book.
—Allan
Spurred by a strand of adulation I read somewhere, I ordered A Sport and a Pastime, a sex idyll set in a French village. Apparently this novel caused something of a stir in 1967, with its precious prose, redolent of novels which use words like "redolent" and its reverent obsession with the minutiae of making love. And before I say anything else, I'll acknowledge that it does cast a certain golden spell. I read it this week mostly on the train back and forth from work; it caught me up immediately, transmuting the commute into wistful reverie, a hazy homeless happiness, at least until I looked up...Salter is (or was) famous for his fine writing. It's true he spins a superb sentence out of seeming air with deliberate ease – but throughout I was reminded of the supersaturated prose of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Readers of a certain age will remember how it all begins:The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of the winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday…And here's the kickoff from A Sport:September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August now is filling up again. It is being replenished.The epicurean approach to love, the occult erotic entanglements, are also, inescapably, redolent of Durrell. I'm not complaining, I absolutely enjoy this specific quality sometimes, although as with foie gras or burrata it's easy to gorge.The most curious aspect of this heterosexual sublime, though, is the structure of the story. The intensely observant, achingly intimate details of the central affaire are narrated by a third party, an American calf of a character who – by any semblance of reality – would barely know any of the story he tells. Which makes all the brushed prose about gushing cunts and enormous pricks and transgressive penetrations a bit weird. The narrator reminds us, more than once, that "None of this is true. 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."Or not. Here is something beyond the bromance of Kerouac and Dean Moriarty (although the lover is named Dean) – the secret sodomy of the repressed. By this reading this entire tale of ineffable carnality is nothing but the hot tortured breath of a voyeur.
—Jim Coughenour
