A Sport and a Pastime

By James Salter

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.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jun 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781453243817

James Salter

James Salter is the author of numerous books, including the novels Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), and The Hunters; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; the collections Dusk and Other Stories, which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Last Night, which won the Rea Award for the Short Story and the PEN/Malamud Award; and Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days, written with Kay Salter. He died in 2015.

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A Sport and a Pastime

James Salter

Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime…

–Koran, LVII19

CONTENTS

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A Biography of James Salter

[1]

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 restaurants are all reopening, the shops. People are coming back from the country, the sea, from trips on roads all jammed with cars. The station is very crowded. There are children, dogs, families with old pieces of luggage bound by straps. I make my way among them. It’s like being in a tunnel. Finally I emerge onto the brilliance of the quai, beneath a roof of glass panels which seems to magnify the light.

On both sides is a long line of coaches, dark green, the paint blistering with age. I walk along reading the numbers, first and second class. It’s pleasant seeing all the plaques with the numbers printed on them. It’s like counting money. There’s a comfortable feeling of delivering myself into the care of those who run these great, somnolent trains, through the clear glass of which people are staring, as drained, as quiet as invalids. It’s difficult to find an empty compartment, there simply are none. My bags are becoming heavy. Halfway down the platform I board, walk along the corridor and finally slide open a door. No one even looks up. I lift my luggage onto the rack and settle into a seat. Silence. It’s as if we’re waiting to see the doctor. I glance around. There are photographs of tourism on the wall, scenes of Brittany, Provence. Across from me is a girl with birthmarks on her leg, birthmarks the color of grape. My eye keeps falling to them. They’re shaped like channel islands.

At last, with a little grunt, we begin to move. There’s a groaning of metal, the sharp slam of doors. A pleasant jolting over switches. The sky is pale. A Frenchman is sleeping in the corner seat, blue coat, blue pants. The blues do not match. They’re parts of two different suits. His socks are pearl grey.

Soon we are rushing along an alley of departure, the houses of the suburbs flashing by, ordinary streets, apartments, gardens, walls. The secret life of France, into which one cannot penetrate, the life of photograph albums, uncles, names of dogs that have died. And in ten minutes, Paris is gone. The horizon, dense with buildings, vanishes. Already I feel free.

Green, bourgeoise France. We are going at tremendous speed. We cross bridges, the sound short and drumming. The country is opening up. We are on our way to towns where no one goes. There are long, wheat-colored stretches and then green, level land, recumbent and rich. The farms are built of stone. The wisdom of generations knows that land is the only real wealth, a knowledge that need not question itself, need not change. Open country flat as playing fields. Stands of trees.

She has moles on her face, too, and one of her fingers is bandaged. I try to imagine where she works–a pâtisserie, I decide. Yes, I can see her standing behind the glass cases of pastry. Yes. That’s just it. Her shoes are black, a little dusty. And very pointed. The points are absurd. Cheap rings on both hands. She wears a black pullover, a black skirt. She’s a bit heavy. Her brow is furrowed as she reads the love stories in Echo Mode. We seem to be going faster.

We are fleeing through the towns. Cesson, a pale station with an old clock. Rivers with barges. We roar through another place, the people on the quai standing still as cows. Tunnels, now, which press one’s ears. It’s as if a huge deck of images is being shuffled. After this will come a trick. Silence, please. The train itself begins to slow a little as if obeying. Across from me the girl has fallen asleep. She has a narrow mouth, cast down at the corners, weighted there by the sourness of knowledge. Her face is turned towards the sun. She stirs. Her hand slips down; the palm comes to rest on her stomach which is already like a Rubens. Now her eyes open without warning. She sees me. She looks away, out the window. Both hands are crossed on her stomach now. Her eyes close once more. We are leaning into curves.

Canals, rich as jade, pass beneath us, canals in which wide barges lie. The water is green with scum. One could almost write on the surface.

Hayfields in long, rectangular patterns. There are hills now, not very high. Poplars. Empty soccer fields. Montereau–a boy on a bicycle waiting near the station. There are churches with weathervanes. Small streams with row-boats moored beneath the trees. She begins looking for a cigarette. I notice that the clasp of her handbag is broken. We are paralleling a road now, going faster than the cars. They hesitate and drift away. The sun is hitting my face. I fall asleep. The beautiful stone of walls and farms is passing unseen. The pattern of fields is passing, some pale as bread, others sea-dark. Now the train slows and begins to move with a measured, a stately clatter as if of carriages. My eyes open. Off in the distance I can see the skeletal grey of a cathedral, the blue outline of Sens. In the station, where for a few minutes we stop, travelers pass along the broken surface of the quai, the gravel sounding beneath their feet. It’s strangely silent, however. There are whispers and coughs, as if during an intermission. I can hear the tearing of paper on a package of cigarettes. The girl is gone. She has gathered her things and left. Sens is on a curve, and the train is leaning. Travelers stare idly from the open windows.

The hills close in and run beside us as we begin slowly to move away from the city. The windows of houses are open to the warm morning air. Hay is stacked in the shape of boxes, coops, loaves of bread. Above us, the sudden passage of a church. In its walls, cracks wide enough for birds to nest in. I am going to walk these village roads, follow these brilliant streams.

Rose, umber, camel, tan–these are the colors of the towns. There are long, rising pastures with lines of trees. St. Julien du Sault–its hotel seems empty. Shocks of hay now, bundles of it. Great squares of corn. Cezy–the station like scenery in a play that has closed. Pyramids of hay, mansards, barricades. Orchards. Children working in vegetable gardens, JOIGNY is printed in red.

We cross a small river, the Yonne, coming into Laroche. There is a hotel, its roof black with age. Flowers in the window boxes. We stop once more. One changes trains here.

Near baggage carts that seem abandoned we stand around quietly. A cart is selling sandwiches and beer. A pregnant girl walks by and glances towards me as she passes. Sunburnt face. Pale eyes. A serene expression. It seems that people, women especially, have become real again. The elegant creatures of the city, of the grand routes, the resorts, have vanished. I hardly remember them. This is somewhere else. Sheds on the far side of the tracks are filled with bicycles. Workmen in blue sit on sunlit benches, waiting.

From here on the line isn’t electrified. The trip is slower. We pass green waters into which trees have fallen. Bitter whiffs of smoke come into the compartment, that marvelous corrosive smoke that eats steel and turns terminals black as coal.

In the corner, in a trenchcoat, her hair gleaming, sits a silent girl with a face like a bird, one of those hard little faces, the bones close beneath it. A passionate face. The face of a girl who might move to the city. She has large eyes, marked in black. A wide mouth, pale as wax. Around her neck is a band of imitation diamonds. It seems I am seeing everything more clearly. The details of a whole world are being opened to me.

The sky is almost completely covered with clouds now. The light has changed, the colors, too. The trees become blue in the distance. The fields turn dry. There are tunnels of hay, mosques, cupolas, domes. Every house has its vegetable garden. The roads here are empty–a motorcyclist, a truck, nothing more. People are traveling elsewhere. Outside a house two small cages are hung for the canaries to get some air. We are passing bricks of hay, casques. We are laboring along. The acid smell of smoke comes and goes. The long, shrill blasts of the whistle, lost in the distance, fill me with joy.

She has taken a caramel out of her handbag. She unwraps it, puts it in her mouth to ensure her silence. Her fingers play with the paper, rolling it slowly, tightening the roll. Her eyes are pale blue. They can stare right through one. The nose is long but feminine. I am curious to see her teeth.

She touches her hair, first beneath one ear, then the other. Her wedding ring seems to be enameled. An umbrella with a violet canopy is strapped to her luggage. The handle is gold, no thicker than a pencil. No polish on her fingernails. She sits motionless now and stares out the window, her mouth curved in a vague expression of resignation. The little girl who is opposite me cannot take her eyes from her.

I begin to look out the window. We are coming close now. Finally, in the distance, against the streaked sky, a town appears. A single, great spire, stark as a monument: Autun. I take my bags down. I have a sudden, little spell of nervousness as I carry them along the corridor. The whole idea of coming here seems visionary.

Only two or three people get off. It’s not yet noon. There’s a single clock with black hands that jump every half-minute. As I walk along, the train begins to move. Somehow it frightens me to have it go. The last car passes. It reveals empty tracks, another quai, not a soul on it. Yes, I can see it already: on certain mornings, on certain winter mornings this is almost completely hidden in mist; details, objects come forth slowly as one walks. In the afternoons, the sun imprints it all with cold, bodiless light. I pass into the main room of the station. There’s a newsstand with iron shutters. It’s closed. A large scale. Schedules on the wall. The man behind the glass of the ticket window doesn’t look up as I walk by.

The Wheatlands’ house is in the old part of town, built right on the Roman wall. First there is a long avenue of trees and then the huge square. A street of shops. After these, nothing, houses, a Utrillo-like silence. At last the Place du Terreau. There’s a fountain, a trifoil fountain from which pigeons are drinking, and looming above, like a great, beached ship: the cathedral. It’s only possible to glimpse the spire, studded along the seams, that marvelous spire which points at the same time to the earth’s center and also the outer void. The road leads around behind. Here many windows are broken. The lead frames, formed like diamonds, are empty and black. A hundred feet farther is a small, blind street, an impasse, as they say, and there it stands.

It’s a large, stone house, the roof sinking, the sills worn. A huge house, the windows tall as trees, exactly as I remember it from a few days of visiting when, on the way up from the station I had a strange conviction I was in a town I already knew. The streets were familiar to me. By the time we reached the gate I had already formed an idea that floated through my mind the rest of the summer, the idea of returning. And now I am here, before the gate. As I look at it, I suddenly see, for the first time, letters concealed in the iron foliage, an inscription: VAINCRE OU MOURIR. The VAINCRE is missing its c.

Autun, still as a churchyard. Tile roofs, dark with moss. The amphitheatre. The great, central square: the Champ de Mars. Now, in the blue of autumn, it reappears, this old town, provincial 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.

[2]

THIS BLUE, INDOLENT TOWN. Its cats. Its pale sky. The empty sky of morning, drained and pure. Its deep, cloven streets. Its narrow courts, the faint, rotten odor within, orange peels lying in the corners. The uneven curbstones, their edges worn away. A town of doctors, all with large houses. Cousson, Proby, Gilot. Even the streets are named for them. Passageways through the Roman wall. The Porte de Breuil, its iron railings sunk into the stone like climbers’ spikes. The women come up the steep grade out of breath, their lungs creaking. A town still rich with bicycles. In the mornings they flow softly past. In the streets there’s the smell of bread.

I am awake before dawn, 0545, the bells striking three times, far off and then a moment later very near. The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly: part of this town and happy. I lean out of the window and am washed by the cool air, air it seems no one has yet breathed. Three boys on motorbikes going by, almost holding hands. And then the pure, melancholy, first blue of morning begins. The air one can bathe in. The electric shriek of a train. Heels on the sidewalk. The first birds. I cannot sleep.

I stand in line in the shops, no one notices. The girls are moving back and forth behind the counters, girls with white faces, with ankles white as soap, worn shoes going at the outside toe, dresses showing beneath the white smocks. Their fingernails are short. In the winter their cheeks will be splotched with red.

"Monsieur?"

They wait for me to speak, and of course it all vanishes then. They know I’m a foreigner. It makes me a little uneasy. I’d like to be able to talk without the slightest trace of accent–I have the ear for it, I’m told. I’d like, impossible, to understand everything that’s said on the radio, the words of the songs. I would like to pass unseen. The little bell hung inside the door rings as I go out, that’s all.

I come back to the house, open the gate, close it again behind me. The click is a pleasing sound. The gravel, small as peas, moves beneath my feet and from it a faint dust rises, the perfume of the town. I breathe it in. I’m beginning to know it, and the neighborhoods as well. A geography of favored streets is forming itself for me while I sleep. This intricate town is unfolding, detail by detail, piece by piece. I walk along the river on the bank between two bridges. I stroll through the cemetery

Reviews for A Sport and a Pastime

[snash_44 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lovely erotic writing, but it could have been just as effective as a short story from my viewpoint. It just seemed to go on and on saying essentially the same thing over and over.

[michaelbartley · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

this a 50's novel that broke ground in writing about sex. Mr. Salter was one of the first American writers to be so open in writing about people having sex. certainly one of the first serious writers. he is a fine writer. it's more then sex.

[iambookish-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5
Okay I read this book and while the prose was terrific, I couldn't really tell you what the book's about :)

It's a little too deep for a reader like me!

[earthforms · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Eh. I couldn't really finish this. I tried. I saw a spoiler about the end and the sex wasn't that good so oh well.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a novel redolent of expressive moments. From the French countryside which one meets on the first page to the game of love played by the young duo - Philip Dean, the American, and Anne Marie, the French girl: 'la belle elle' - the reader is presented a world of existential transport. The unnamed narrator describes the passions of his friend Dean as they experience the culture of France and Dean experiences a breathless few months of carnal episodes.It begins with a "luminous" September with still lengthy days and in a city filling with crowds after their August retreats suggesting that the unnamed narrator is making the right choice as he boards the train to depart the city. As he begins his train ride the sun hitting his face leads him to sleep. While he wakes as the train slows it is as if the scenes he shares are merely a continuation of his dreams. He admits: "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."(p 11) Reminiscent of Ford's The Good Soldier, our narrator is unreliable and his tale may be taken as a story that may not have happened or at least not happened quite exactly as depicted by the narrator.Swiftly we meet the narrator's friend Dean and are introduced to the ingenue Ann Marie and the memories of the small French towns, the Summer evenings, speeding down the highway in Dean's borrowed roadster carry you forward while the many brief liaisons of Dean and Anne Marie acquire a status that they would never have if they occurred on the lower east side of Manhattan. Even at Yale, for Dean is an Eli, they would seem tawdry at best, but the ability of the narrator to portray the indescribable beauty of France elevates the story to a better place. However all is not so clear upon reflection for while Dean is no innocent, Anne Marie may not be either. One cloud that is always haunting Dean is the need for money to fuel his journey with Anne Marie. He is a poor English tutor (is there any other kind?) who depends upon his wealthy Father for funds and when his Father is not forthcoming he begs for loans from his friends. The days and nights, various towns and country lanes blend together as the story speeds toward a denouement that must be left for the reader to discover on his own.In 1959, only eight years before the publication of A Sport and a Pastime, the Grove Press brought out their American edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover. The erotic realism of Salter's novel owes at least part of its heritage to the liberation made possible by that earlier milestone. Salter's prose is as beautiful as any I have read and with that beauty he transports you to a French land of dreams both light and dark. "The orchestras of the world beat softly" in the night as the lovers at midnight share their being.This is a magnificent short novel that begs to be reread if only to share its haunting beauty and experience again the charms of its magic.

[paulagraph · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I rarely abandon a book, but Salter's novel, albeit stylistically elegant, is simply boring. He can write perfect sentences. I'll grant him that. But the novel itself doesn't add up to anything I need or want to know, see or discover. As many reviewers have noted, the novel seems dated. In fact, I had to continually remind myself that the setting is France 1962 and not decades earlier. There are echos of Tender Is the Night but without the fascinating driving off-a-cliff craziness of Fitzgerald's novel. As for sexism, the French Feminists would have had a field day deconstructing A Sport and a Pastime according to the theory of The Gaze. As for racism, there are a few instances of the "n" word in conjunction with a bit of racial stereotyping. These flare up in the headlights, so to speak, and then are gone--casual, surnois as the French might say, but not terribly meaningful.

[maritimer_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reading A Sport and a Pastime, it is soon obvious why James Salter is considered one of America's great writers, his story being filled as it is, with "luminous days". It also becomes evident why such writing, in and of itself, may not be enough for him to necessarily be considered one of her great novelists. A Sport and a Pastime's narrator is entirely implausible, and it isn't enough that this is self-evident: Salter must continuously remind the dim reader that this is so. This wry, meta winking may have been intended to keep us vigilant, but its more likely outcome is to make us lose interest. It must have been a risk that Salter was ready to take: the sacrifice of readers for whom narrative authority matters in a story, for the sake of those who would question the device itself.

[coclimber · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Beautiful prose, lots and lots of sex, and a very minimal plot. After a while, even the beautiful prose wore thin for me. The sex scenes (and there are many) are very creative and often erotic or just plain hot. I found myself skimming much of the final third of the book.

[ecantulv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book. Slowly. Took it all in. word for word. I devoured the style of writing. By the end, I was a little confused about who was the narrator. I reread the introduction again, and realized that in someways, the narrator was mystery. Also, I think possibly it was up to who you thought the narrator was. By the last line of this book and when I finally closed it, I felt an instant hope for love. I was even filled with a desire for it. This was a very well written book. In ways, this book possibly reads like a romance novel. But since I've never read one, I can't be for certain. Regardless, this book, to me, even though the story appears to be so common, was in a sense and in someway, completely original and absolutely beautiful.

[chrisried · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written. How can you not pick up a book that opens like this: "September. It seems these luminous days will never end..." I didn't particularly like the characters, but that isn't the point. The relationship between Dean and Anne-Marie, and the narrator's imagining/telling of it -- the story itself is the point. There's a later edition with an introduction by Reynolds Price that I wish I'd bought instead. I'll have to hunt that down.

[Richard Magahiz · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The wonderful lyrical passages, little observations or more expansive bits of fancy, were the best part of this book. The idea that these characters were romantic heroes in any way, as stated in the last scenes, did not resonate with me at all. The protagonist Dean just seemed like a 1960s version of a slacker, free of responsibility, bugging his family and friends for money to support his aimless life centered on lots of sex with his girlfriend Anne-Marie. They drive around a lot, eat in restaurants, have a few quarrels, but never seem to mind that they don't have any real interests, just some vague ideas of marriage and settling down. I could guess from the start how likely that was going to turn out.
I'd read Salter's Solo Faces previously and while I had some problems with that novel, I think I prefer it to this earlier one, even though I think the author thought that this was the only one he considered a successful work.

[hagelstein_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In 1960s France the unnamed narrator tells of the relationship between his American friend, Dean Phillips, and a French girl named Anne-Marie. There are erotic scenes but the story stands on it's own. Like Americans before and after, they discover France, fall in love, and flirt with staying. The narrator repeatedly hints that the story may be totally false, or not. No matter, the writing is very good.

[skavlanj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not sure how I feel about this book. At times the clipped sentences are effectively evocative; at other times I found myself rereading them, inserting and deleting commas to make them sound correct in my mind. There isn't an involved plot but rather repetition masquerading as action - driving and dining and f---ing. And you have to describe it as f---ing. There isn't an illusion of romance or love in the story, except perhaps the narrator's (to me) out-of-place "Days of marriage" ramblings during their final trip to the coast, which I'm inclined to believe are the lies he tells himself to avoid looking beyond his naked reflection he too often enjoys looking at in the mirror. And yet I never considered setting this book aside, disappointment though it turned out to be.I'm not curious enough to verify this, but I believe Anne-Marie is the only character who calls Phillip by his given name. If Salter's intent in having the narrator consistently refer to him as Dean was to imbue the story with a sense of detachment, it worked for me. I'm also ambivalent about the choice of first person narration. Coupled with the lack of clarity in his narrator's background, the voyeuristic nature of his storytelling left me without a character to feel strongly for or against and without a deeper involvement in the story of a desultory season in France with Dean and the nondescript receptacle of his indifference than in the list of hotels they create for their various excursions. Dean's death at the end of the book isn't tragic; in fact, it isn't even necessary. Rather, Salter lets his protagonist escape without having to live down to our expectation that one day of not writing to Anne-Marie will become one week will become one year will become forever.Like another reviewer I pulled this book from a list in Esquire and have to wonder what it was the list-maker found worthy of recommendation. I found if on a winter's night a traveler much more sensuous without the grating specificity of pricks and vaseline and tampons. If this book is on your list, read it when you get to it and have run out of top tier fiction. It has its moments but its sum is less than its parts.

[ron18-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A man nearing middle age confesses to being an unreliable narrator while relaying a sexy account of a whirlwind romance in a dreamlike setting. That's the whole shebang. Sublime in its relative simplicity.

Over the story hangs intimations of tragedy, regret, unrealistic expectations, and envy - but most of all, longing for the roads not taken (about fantasizing over the potential sweetness of those roads, despite their pitfalls) and the inability to travel them due to the human conditions of insecurity, and unrealistic (but enviable) opportunity.

The book is never pornographic (but is frequently erotic in a touching, though unreliably idealized, way). The narrator isn't portrayed as non-straight. It isn't sexist (Anne-Marie is sex positive, and jokes about English sex being stodgy). Using the word "nigger" and expressing casual fascination of black people and their relationships in early 1960's France (among a bilingual couple, no less) isn't racist. However, each of these (As Seen On Goodreads!) accusations contains the seeds of potentially productive conversations on the subjects - a praiseworthy achievement for Salter.

[ROSALIND GREEN · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

sensitively written, tender love story with a feeling of inevitable doom (don't think that's a spoiler)

[jonnharris12267 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

wow thanks "yakifat" for telling us all how it ends you jackass. geez. .

[jgmencarini · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read several glowing reviews of this novel from literary luminaries, but I had a difficult time understanding it. While the prose was excellent, the plot seemed pointless and hard to grasp.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The title of this book comes from this line out of the Koran: “Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime…”The narrator is a 34-year-old American living in France, who meets Phillip Dean, a 21-year-old dropout from Yale who is bouncing around, making it up as he goes along. Dean is everything the narrator is not. While the narrator is impotent to approach a woman named Claude who, “when she walks, leaves me weak”, Dean picks up and begins a highly sexual relationship with 18-year-old Anne-Marie, a French girl who turns out to be highly complaisant in bed.The narrator describes acts between the two that he couldn’t possibly know. There is nothing inconsistent about this, for at the outset he warns that “none of this is true…I’m sure you’ll come to realize that.” Later, in the middle of the book, he says “I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that”, and at the end, it’s “one must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them.”This creates a few different possibilities for what’s “real”; the entire thing could be the imaging of the narrator, or perhaps it’s just what Dean and Anne-Marie are like in bed which is the subject of his fantasies. The story is enjoyable regardless. The prose is spare and yet often beautiful, though Salter tends to fall in love with the use of similes, some of which are more successful than others, at least in this book. The character of Dean reminds me of Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty; the narrator describes him as having a life which seems “more truthful”, and “even able to draw mine to it like the pull of a dark star.” Dean does not care what others think, and is “close to the life that flows, is transient, borne away … joined to the brevity of things.” He gets what he wants out of his friends and family, borrowing an expensive car and money from several of them, as well as what he wants out of Anne-Marie in bed. The book has many highly erotic descriptions of sex, and a taboo act in particular. Anne-Marie is completely willing, but there is an element of hope in her which seems doomed from the beginning given Dean’s rambling nature. For “All of Anne-Marie’s joy proceeds from the hope that they are only beginning, that before them is marriage and farewell to Autun, while like the negative from which her dreams are printed, he perceives the opposite. For Dean, every hour is piercing because it is closer to the end.”In this sense, it’s the tragedy of life which passes all too soon, and of young love that is often fleeting, despite its purity and intensity. Quotes:On fantasies:“…it’s impossible to control these dreams. The forbidden ones are incandescent – they burn through resolutions like cloth. I cannot stop them even if I want to. I cannot make them vanish. They are brighter than the day that surrounds me.”And this one, on the delicacy of describing a fantasy to a lover:“…they stroll in the mild sunlight and talk of the ways to love, the sweet variety.‘What are they?’ she wants to know.Dean begins casually, arranging as he does a bouquet of alternatives to conceal the one he really desires. He has said it a hundred times to himself, rehearsing, but still his heart skips.”On love, and that moment when it comes into question:“There are terrible moments in which one sees love with cold eyes.”On lust:“…I try to watch her, to isolate elements of that stunning sexuality, but it’s like memorizing the reflections of a diamond.”On middle age:“She’s not young, but rather in the midst of that last and most confident beauty, like the mother of a schoolmate. You see her emerging from a car, the flash of an elegant calf, and you are tumbled into unbearable love.”On old age:“He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights, each one perilous as a lunar journey.”On sex:I loved this one:“As his prick goes into her, he discovers the world. He knows the source of numbers, the path of the stars.”In another encounter, and perhaps similar:“In the great, secret provinces where she then exists, stars are falling like confetti, the skies turn white.”After a description of an act which I’ll spare you:“It is these exchanges which cement them, that is the terrible thing. These atrocities induce them towards love.”And this joke, on English sex, uttered while observing a quiet English couple:“…they sit in an utter, English silence reading the menu as if it were a contract. In an accent so perfect it surprises me, Anne-Marie whispers,‘Did I hurt you darling?’‘What?’It’s a line from a joke Dean’s told her. Her face is full of mischievous joy. But I don’t know the original story. She delivers it with the assurance of a clown. That’s what he says, she explains. They’re in bed together. Then she says: no, why? And he says: you moved.”On travel:“It’s in the little towns that one discovers a country, in the kind of knowledge that comes from small days and nights.”

[Eda Edy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Tonight, I finished James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, which was fascinating from how he wrote of the relationships between the man and the woman at the center of the book. But even more uniquely impressive was how he wrote about the strength of their sensual and sexual experiences and feelings. It made me think of watching my late wife— which as a survivor I find myself thinking about constantly—and how sensual watching your love doing anything can become. There is such a truth and honesty when Salter wrote the following. “She stands naked, her legs together, brushing her teeth before the sink. Dean is watching her carefully. From where he sits, he reaches out and touches her. There is no authority in the gesture. It is an act of reassurance—he is fixing her reality.” And again, when he wrote this. “Dean makes love to her with great tenderness, kissing her shoulders, listening to her breath. It’s as if he’s never done it before. He tries to memorize her. His hands touch her carefully. His lips form reverent phrases.” The passion expressed in his writing was so strong, tender, and real. Then, I thought of how badly written, how mechanical and cold most sex scenes are written. It is as if they are writing more about alienation and detachment, like a lonely late-night visit to a porn site online. I know some writers are intending for this lack of any feeling, no connection other than mechanical, but I think the rest are just incapable of describing anything sensual. It also makes me wonder at what age males in our culture are able to figure out the differences between, and the beauty of, the sexual and the sensual. This book stunned me with how deep it reached into me and moved me. Yet, early in my reading, I found my mind wandering some. It was only after he wrote of the sensual side of his characters, made them so human, that I became fascinated by his use of the language, and the book has become more and more powerful every time I think of it. This was easily one of the most sensual books I’ve ever read.

[rmagahiz · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The wonderful lyrical passages, little observations or more expansive bits of fancy, were the best part of this book. The idea that these characters were romantic heroes in any way, as stated in the last scenes, did not resonate with me at all. The protagonist Dean just seemed like a 1960s version of a slacker, free of responsibility, bugging his family and friends for money to support his aimless life centered on lots of sex with his girlfriend. They drive around a lot, eat in restaurants, have a few quarrels, but never seem to mind that they don't have any real interests, just some vague ideas of marriage and settling down. I could guess from the start how likely that was going to turn out.
I'd read Salter's Solo Faces previously and while I had some problems with that novel, I think I prefer it to this earlier one, even though I think the author thought that this was the only one he considered a successful work.

[boredgames · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Gorgeous prose but repetitive; sex is not that compelling to read about but the writing is inimitably beautiful as usual

[mrtall_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Sport and a Pastime is a young upper-middle class American man’s dreamy journey through post-war France, as he drinks in the landscape and culture, and, well, gets it on with a French shopgirl.I’ve never read another book quite like this one – it’s written through the eyes of an observer (the protagonist’s friend) whose narrative is undermined by his own frank admissions of unreliability and invention. It’s an odd setup, and quite pretentious, but it’s redeemed by the quality of description in many passages, which of course are in the words of the nameless narrator, who’s a writing virtuoso, yet sad and not a little creepy; he’s essentially a eunuch who can’t quite believe or accept his friend’s sexual power and mastery. One aspect of this book that a responsible reviewer must note is its frequent sexual content. It’s not gratuitous; indeed the ‘progress’ in the couple’s sexual activities is the central metaphor driving the story, as it were. But although Salter is never obscene, he is often graphic and vulgar, as human life so often must be. Recommended, but for mature readers.