Touring Paris and provincial France in a handsome borrowed car, Philip Dean, Yale dropout, has an affair with a young French woman named Anne-Marie. Their liaison is imagined with candour and sensitivity by an unnamed narrator, whose fantasies become compellingly and hauntingly real. A Sport and A Pastime has been hailed as a watershed in American fiction of the 1960s: remarkable for its eroticism, its luminous prose and its ability to blur the boundaries of reality and dreamlife, daytime and nightime, soul and flesh. 'A ...
Read More
Touring Paris and provincial France in a handsome borrowed car, Philip Dean, Yale dropout, has an affair with a young French woman named Anne-Marie. Their liaison is imagined with candour and sensitivity by an unnamed narrator, whose fantasies become compellingly and hauntingly real. A Sport and A Pastime has been hailed as a watershed in American fiction of the 1960s: remarkable for its eroticism, its luminous prose and its ability to blur the boundaries of reality and dreamlife, daytime and nightime, soul and flesh. 'A tour de force in erotic realism, a romantic cliffhanger, an opaline vision of Americans in France' New York Times 'Salter is the contemporary writer most admired and envied by other writers . . . he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence' Washington Post
Read Less
Add this copy of A Sport and a Pastime to cart. $44.78, good condition, Sold by Pieuler LLC rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from IPSWICH, SUFFOLK, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2007 by Picador USA.
this novel echoes the best of ernest hemingway and henry miller without imitating either. it also creates an erotic fantasy that seems absolutely rooted in the minutae of ordinary relationships. but these are lesser qualities compared to what a sport and a pastime does to celebrate provincial france. that is where the real love story exists, within the quiet french countryside that salter evokes with a closely observed reverence for delail that utterly separates his geography from the rest of the world. i honestly don't know another piece of fiction that does this so beautifully and effortlessly, making salter's jewel a work with nothing quite like it.
