A Sport and a Pastime
"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price (The New York Times) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, it is the intensely carnal story--part shocking reality, part feverish dream --of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen--and pages that burn with a rare intensity.
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A beautiful, lyrical tale of an ill-fated love affair set against the backdrop of a myriad of small French towns, this stunning novel is observed through the eyes and imagination of a narrator who, in the story of Dean and Anne-Marie s relationship, captures some essential aspect of what it means to be truly alive. When we first meet Dean, a handsome Yale dropout possessed of great charm and a certain confident aloofness, he seems a man for whom life is easy and effortless. During what is intended to be a brief holiday in France, Dean pursues a passionate affair with Anne-Marie, an alluring, beautiful young shopgirl who is wise beyond her years and experience. Driving across the countryside in his elegant, somewhat dilapidated Delage, they stop at picturesque hotels and engage in romantic trysts that build in intimacy and ardor. Issues of class prove a stumbling block for Dean, however, and as Anne-Marie begins to shed her doubts about him, he vacillates between envisioning a comfortable life with Anne-Marie and wanting to escape from her suffocating proximity. The narrator keenly and acutely observes and imagines the lovers public sojourns and private embraces, interpreting both his own voyeurism and their affair as criminal acts. In A Sport and a Pastime, Salter has created a perfect gem of a book, at once an erotic masterpiece and a haunting, transcendent examination of humanity and sexual desire.The Washington Post Book World - Ned RoremSalter inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and John Cheever.
\ Reynolds PriceAs nearly perfect as any American fiction I know.\ \ \ \ \ Ned RoremSalter inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and John Cheever.\ — The Washington Post Book World\ \ \ TimeThe encounters of Dean and Anne-Marie seem not to require reading but sensing, as if the touch of the eye were almost too much for reality. And when at last the dream breaks, it is not with a shatter but a silent splintering of crystal fragments.\ \ \ \ \ New York Times Book ReviewA tour de force of erotic realism, a romantic cliff-hanger, an opaline vision of Americans in France... A Sport and a Pastime succeeds as art must. It tells us about ourselves. (The New York Times Book Review).\ \
