A game and a pastime

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A game and a pastime (English original title: A Sport and a Pastime ) is a novel by the American writer James Salter . It was published in 1967 by the New York publisher Doubleday . The German translation by Beatrice Howeg was published by Berlin Verlag in 1998 . The novel describes a love affair between an American and a French woman in rural France. She is being watched by a compatriot of the American who projects his own passions into the affair. Because of its erotic scenes, the novel was controversial at the time of its publication. It is now considered a classic of modern American literature and is one of the most famous works by Salter.

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In the early 1960s, the gifted 24-year-old Phillip Dean, the son of a well-known American theater critic, dropped out of his mathematics studies at Yale due to being under-challenged and went on a trip to Europe. In Dijon , he met 18-year-old Frenchwoman Anne-Marie Costallat in a nightclub and spent the following months with the young saleswoman. From Autun , where an American couple is staying, he takes his swanky Delage cabriolet across France. Above all, he spends a lot of time in bed with his willing lover and explores various sexual practices with her. While Anne-Marie dreams of a future together, Dean knows about the limitations of the affair between lovers of very different origins. This is precisely what makes her so attractive for him.

The rapporteur is an unnamed 34-year-old first-person narrator , also an American, also a guest in France and, like Dean, living right into the day. But unlike Dean, his shy advances to a French neighbor are unsuccessful. In this way, he projects his wishes and envy onto his compatriot, who for him embodies the ideal type of a youthful hero. With Dean's passion he looks at his young lover. He describes the couple's conversations and love games in detail without being present at their encounters. Again and again he draws the reader's attention to the fact that everything could only come from his imagination.

After a year, Dean, who has kept his head above water with private lessons, runs out of money. He borrows the amount for a return ticket from the narrator and returns to the United States to continue his studies and lead a regular life. Despite all oaths of loyalty, Anne-Marie knows that he will neither return nor make up for her as promised. Shortly afterwards she received the news of his death: he died in a car accident at night. The narrator's attempt to take Dean's place with the mourners fails. She later marries and lives an ordinary life in Troyes . Dean, on the other hand, remains for him the young hero whom he himself created with his admiration. But heroes are also mortal and eventually fade.

History and reception

In Salter's assessment, A Sport and a Pastime is the first good book he has written. Looking back, this novel and Light Years (1975, German: Lichtjahre ) are the two works with which he wanted to be remembered as a writer. First notes in the novel go back to 1961. In that year Salter was reactivated as a reservist in the United States Air Force in the wake of the Berlin crisis and stationed as an officer in France. He described the strong impression that the country made on him in 1997 in his memoir Burning the Days (German: Burned Days ). According to him, he lived three lives at the same time: one during the day, one at night and one in the notes in a drawer, in which he kept things that he could not have written or even imagined a second time. The actual work on the novel took place in 1964/65, when Salter owned a studio in New York 's Greenwich Village , where he wrote daily.

Salter's then-publisher Harper & Row was reluctant to publish A Sport and a Pastime , justifying this by stating that the novel contained “more than the normal amount of sex” without which it would be “very thin”. George Plimpton of the Paris Review brought the manuscript to Doubleday , New York . But this publisher also felt uncomfortable with the book, only produced a small edition and, according to Salter, was "very satisfied to see it disappear without a trace". Webster Schott wrote in a review of the New York Times that it was a "tour de force in erotic realism " and an "ongoing journey into the soul via the flesh". The publisher limited its advertising to stating that A Sport and a Pastime was not a book about baseball , and otherwise treated it like "a pair of dirty socks," according to Salter. After long out of print, it was reissued in 1985, and Reynolds Price hailed it as the book he admired most of all the books by living authors: “In its special combination of luminous surface and dark interior, it is as perfect as any other American literature that I know. "

Meanwhile, according to Heller McAlpin , A Sport and a Pastime has become a modern classic of erotic realism and literature about American exiles. Adam Begley calls the novel "extraordinary in its own way". Details create an atmosphere in which the love affair seems to break out of the imagination. Even decades after its publication, Ian Crouch believes the book is instructive in a very practical sense as regards terminology, positions and tools during sex, but also with regard to the feelings it evokes. According to Sarah Hall, the novel not only sets the standard for eroticism in literature, but also for the essential literary organ: the imagination. The short, tragic love story turns out to be an ambitious exploration of the nature of storytelling and the reasons that make people invent love stories. Salter himself describes his novel in the foreword of the new edition as a "hymn to the small towns and villages, to the Parisian architecture, the French side streets and, of course, to the most ardent of all earthly desires".

expenditure

  • James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime . Doubleday, New York 1967.
  • James Salter: A Game and a Pastime . German by Beatrice Howeg. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-8270-0096-3 .
  • James Salter: A Game and a Pastime . German by Beatrice Howeg. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2000, ISBN 3-499-22440-2 .
  • James Salter: A Game and a Pastime . Translated from the English by Beatrice Howeg. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-8333-0950-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Adam Begley: A Few Well-Chosen Words . In: The New York Times, October 28, 1990.
  2. ^ A b Edward Hirsch: James Salter, The Art of Fiction No. 133 . In: The Paris Review No. 127, Summer 1993. Reprinted in: Jennifer Levasseur, Kevin Rabalais (Eds.): Conversations with James Salter . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2015, ISBN 978-1-4968-0358-0 , no pages.
  3. ↑ a b Burkhard Scherer: Quiet days with a waitress . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 6, 1998.
  4. ↑ a b c Helen T. Verongos: James Salter, a 'Writer's Writer' Short on Sales but Long on Acclaim, Dies at 90 . In: The New York Times, June 19, 2015.
  5. ↑ "tour de force in erotic realism [...] continuous journey of the soul via the flesh". Quoted from: Webster Schott: Toujours L'Amour . In: The New York Times, April 2, 1967.
  6. ↑ David Streitfeld . In: The Washington Post, April 23, 1989.
  7. ↑ "Of living novelists, none has produced a book I admire more than A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter. In its peculiar compound of lucid surface and dark interior, it's as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know. ”Quoted from: Summer Reading; Famous First Words: Well Begun Is Half Done . In: The New York Times, June 2, 1985.
  8. ↑ Heller McAlpin: Salter knows exactly how love leads people astray . In: San Francisco Chronicle, April 24, 2005.
  9. ↑ Ian Crouch: Love and Glory . In: The Paris Review of April 7, 2011.
  10. ↑ “Since its publication in 1967, during the decade of sexual revolution, A Sport and a Pastime has set the standard not only for eroticism in fiction, but for the principal organ of literature - the imagination. What appears at first to be a short, tragic novel about a love affair in France is in fact an ambitious, refractive inquiry into the nature and meaning of storytelling, and the reasons we are compelled to invent, in particular, romances. "Quoted from : Sarah Hall: Beautiful and brutal: how James Salter set the standard for erotic writing . In: The Guardian of February 17, 2017.