A Sport and a Pastime
 Book cover | |
| Author | James Salter |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Erotic novel |
| Set in | France |
| Published | 1967 by Doubleday |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 191 pp |
| OCLC | 291893 |
A Sport and a Pastime (1967) is a novel by the American writer James Salter.
Summary
Set in France in the early 1960s, the sad and tender story concerns the erotic affair of American middle-class college drop-out Philip Dean and a young French girl, Anne-Marie, as witnessed by a self-consciously unreliable narrator. The unnamed narrator freely admits that much of his observation is in fact his own fantasy of the couple, and includes a number of sexually-explicit descriptions of their day-to-day existence as he imagines it.
Reception
The book is generally regarded by critics as a modern classic. In the New York Times Book Review, novelist and critic Reynolds Price wrote, "Of living novelists, none has produced a novel I admire more than A Sport and a Pastime ... it's as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know."[1] The critic and biographer Adam Begley, in the New York Times Magazine, called it "extraordinary ... The book feels utterly true."[2]
Location
Many of the story's events take place in the town of Autun in Burgundy.