3.0
A Sport and a Pastime
ByPublisher Description
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
and the memoir
, 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
. One of the first great American novels to speak frankly of human desire free of guilt and shame,
inspired Reynolds Price to call it "as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know."
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesA Sport and a Pastime Reviews
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ewa
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Jessica Marsh
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Tory Morrison
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“Well half the time I felt confused what was going on and annoyed at the privileged rich boy running around France and then every once in awhile I’d feel very inspired by the writing (it is beautiful) and immersed in a vintage French setting. It seems like books I read from this time period usually have a young grumpy rich boy who is kind of annoyed at everything?
Anyways my takeaways are to walk around topless more often like French women and go out to dinner just to go out to dinner and walk the streets afterwards. Also would like to drive around small French towns in a vintage car.”
“"Life is composed of certain basic elements," he says. "Of course, there are a lot of impurities, that's what's misleading."
"What I'm saying may sound mystical, but in everybody, Ame, in all of us, there's the desire to find those elements somehow, to discover them, you know? Sometimes I think they're the same for all of us, but maybe they're not. I mean, we look at the Greeks and say, ah, they built this civilization, this whole brilliant world, out of certain, simple things. why can't we? And if not a civilization, why can't each of us, properly directed, build a life, I mean a happy life? Believe me, the elements exist. When you enter certain rooms, when you look at certain faces, suddenly you realize you're in the presence of them. Do you know what I mean?"
"Of course, I do," she says. "If you could achieve that,
you'd have everything."
"And without it you have ….." he shrugs, "a life."
"Like everybody's."
"Just like everybody's," he says.
"I don't want that."
"Neither do I."”
Rose Carlson
Created 3 months agoShare
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“Honestly, couldn’t really tell you what the book is about. Maybe I’m just not the classic book type but I was so bored and lost most of the book.”
About James Salter
James Salter (1925–2015) was a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and air force pilot until his mid-30s, when the success of his first novel (
1957) led to a full-time writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel
(1967) was hailed by the
as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.”
Other books by James Salter
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