Synopses & Reviews
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
Synopsis
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.