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Light Years
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
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Light Years
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Summary
This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness - and then felt compelled to destroy it.
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What listeners say about Light Years
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- BJD
- 16-05-19
The real thing
Just a joy from start to finish. Beautifully written and beautifully read. Moving and funny and memorable. I listened to it and went straight back and listened again.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Lord Emsworth
- 19-01-20
Hard work but ultimately worth it
I struggle with books in which the point more about “the beautiful writing” and less about the plot.
Light Years (1975) by James Salter is the story of a marriage between two Americans, the Berlands: Nedra (the woman) and Viri (the man). Viri was born in 1928 and Nedra a few years later which made me wonder if they had renamed themselves, or if two sets of American parents were giving their kids such unusual names in that era? Other characters have names like Franca, Jivan, Kaya, Arnauld, and Hadji (this one a dog).
The Berlands are part of an arty, intellectual, somewhat pretentious, tortured, affluent and self absorbed crowd many of whom are in a permanent state of dissatisfaction. Do these people really exist anywhere outside of imagination?
Viri is haunted by the fear of obscurity and failure. Nedra dreads age, poverty, and ordinariness. The couple and their friends have no apparent financial concerns and it is unclear how Viri’s work as an architect funds such a relatively opulent and leisurely lifestyle for the couple, and their family and friends.
Light Years covers almost twenty years. At the start Nedra is 28 and by the conclusion she is 47 years old. The passage of time is one of the novel’s motifs.
The plot, such as it is, was slightly puzzling. Nedra and Viri live a charmed and good life, complete with two lovely daughters, a dog, and a vibrant social life yet, enjoying a lovely rural environment just outside New York and yet, before you know it, they’re both being unfaithful, and eventually they split up.
A preponderance of four and five star reviews on Amazon and GoodReads is testimony to this book’s appeal for many readers who are in thrall Salter’s beautiful writing. In reality his writing is over laden with metaphors, similes, and analogies, aligned to a meandering plot
I found it an uneven read. I was compelled to stick with it as I was reading it for my book group. Actually I was listening to it, which meant I was able to speed up the excellent narration to get through it more quickly.
The ending is poignant and profound, and this made me reevaluate the novel and increase my provisional rating. It certainly picked up in the final section and this part was interesting and satisfying.
3/5
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