James Salter était un romancier, un nouvelliste et un scénariste dont la prose puissante et lyrique lui a valu les éloges de la critique et des lecteurs. Sa carrière antérieure en tant que pilote de l'armée de l'air a marqué son écriture d'une perspective et d'une précision uniques. Salter a exploré les complexités des relations humaines, le désir et la fugacité de la vie avec une intelligence vive et une profonde perspicacité. Sa capacité à capturer des moments de beauté et de douleur avec une telle élégance en fait un conteur captivant.
La quatrième de couverture indique : Viri pose les yeux sur sa femme, Nedra. Une mèche de cheveux lui balaie délicatement la nuque, elle s'affaire en cuisine dans sa jolie robe rouge. Leurs deux adorables petites filles dînent devant le feu de cheminée. Sont-ils réellement heureux ? Ils forment un couple envié de tous, elle si belle, lui si élégant. Leur bonheur semble parfait... Mais la perfection est-elle vraiment de ce monde ?
Onze variations sur le passage. Le passage du jour à la nuit, de l’enfance à l'âge adulte, de la vie à la mort. Un accident de cheval, un oiseau mort, la couleur du Rhin à Bâle, une chambre d'hôtel à Vérone, une fille au pair un peu trop provocante : tels sont les motifs à partir desquels James Salter développe sa mélodie ? ce mélange de mélancolie, d'émotion et de sécheresse, qui n'appartient qu'à lui.
Note de l'éditeur : La Seconde Guerre mondiale touche à sa fin. À bord d’un porte-avions au large du Japon, Philip Bowman rentre aux États-Unis. Il a deux obsessions, qui l’accompagneront tout au long de sa vie : la littérature et la quête de l’amour. Embauché par un éditeur, il découvre ce milieu très fermé, fait de maisons indépendantes, et encore dirigées par ceux qui les ont fondées. Bowman s’y sent comme un poisson dans l’eau, et sa réussite s’avère aussi rapide qu’indiscutable. Reste l’amour, ou plutôt cette sorte d’idéal qu’il poursuit, et qui ne cesse de se dérober à lui. L’échec d’un premier mariage, l’éblouissement de la passion physique et le goût amer de la trahison sont quelques-uns des moments de cette chasse au bonheur dont l’issue demeure incertaine. Ce livre magnifique est comme le testament d’une génération d’écrivains, derniers témoins, sans le savoir, d’un monde promis à la disparition. Parce que l’art est le seul lieu où les contraires coexistent sans se détruire, il noue d’un même geste la soif de vivre de la jeunesse et la mélancolie de l’âge mûr, la frénésie érotique et le besoin d’apaisement, la recherche de la gloire et la conscience aigüe de son insignifiance.
In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America's finest writers re-creates people, places, and events spanning some fifty years, bringing to life an entire era through one man's sensibility. Scenes of love and desire, friendship, ambition, life in foreign cities and New York, are unforgettably rendered here in the unique style for which James Salter is widely admired. Burning the Days captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan boyhood and then, satisfying his father's wishes, graduation from West Point, followed by service in the Air Force as a pilot. In some of the most evocative pages ever written about flying, Salter describes the exhilaration and terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, scenes that are balanced by haunting pages of love and a young man's passion for women. After resigning from the Air Force, Salter begins a second life, becoming a writer in the New York of the 1960s. Soon films beckon. There are vivid portraits of actors, directors, and producers—Polanski, Robert Redford, and others. Here also, more important, are writers who were influential, some by their character, like Irwin Shaw, others because of their taste and knowledge. Ultimately Burning the Days is an illumination of what it is to be a man, and what it means to become a writer. Only once in a long while—Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory or Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa —does a memoir of such extraordinary clarity and power appear. Unconventional in form, Burning the Days is a stunning achievement by the writer The Washington Post Book World said "inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever"—a rare and unforgettable book.
From his first published story in the Paris Review in 1968, James Salter's stories have been universally acclaimed. Including his two published collections, Dusk and Other Stories (1988) and Last Night (2005), and the previously uncollected 'Charisma', this volume contains over twenty short stories by one of the finest writers of our time. Concerning men and women in their most intimate moments, struggling with loss, desire, or the burden of memory, each indelible narrative in the Collected Stories is marked by James Salter's great literary grace, his ability to show the subtleties of a character or situation with precision, and his equally assured ability to command reversals of fortune or shocking revelations.
Viri and Nedra Berland live a gilded life with their two daughters in upstate New York. But as the years roll by, the cracks in their marriage become crevasses. It seems that in testing the very limits of their happiness, Nedra and Vira are compelled to destroy it.
Vernon Rand, a mountaineer, abruptly leaves his job and wife to climb in the Alps. He and his friend Cabot attempt to scale the North Face of the Dru, but disaster strikes when Cabot falls and is left paralyzed. Rand struggles to accept this and dedicates himself to healing his friend, both physically and mentally.
The seductive classic that established Salter's reputation as one of the finest prose stylists of our time
NATIONAL BESTSELLER A New York Times Book Review Notable Book An NPR "Great Reads" Book All That Is explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change. Philip Bowman returns to America from the battlefields of Okinawa and finds success in the competetive world of publishing in postwar New York—yet what he most desires, and what eludes him, is love. Here is PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter's dazzling, sometimes devastating portrait of love and ambition, a fiercely intimate account of the great shocks and grand pleasures of being alive.
