Elegant and elusive

I understand why other writers prize James Salters as a novelist. His scenes are vivid, evocative, and also oblique. There is a fascinating combination of detail given and fact withheld. Like Proust, he tells you a lot--but leaves out a lot as well. His prose recreates the feeling of certain friendships: colorful and engaging in the moment, and then somewhat puzzling in the aftermath. Yet the characters take on so much life in Salter's masterful hands. I greatly enjoyed "Light Years": arty but not arch, poetic but not self-indulgent--nothing goes on too long, everything proportionate. And no one writes similes like Salter. I reveled in it, but readers who are in search of straightforward, page-turning narrative could get frustrated This is literary fiction of the highest quality.
The narrator Mark Boyett, is very good in all the important ways--his rhythm is just right, he evokes the different characters (with their many foreign accents) nicely, and he doesn't moon over the lyrical sections. My only gripe is that he mispronounces foreign words from time to time, a pet peeve of mine: he says "restina" for "retsina," for example, puts the wrong accent on the Italian word "facile..." You get the picture. It's a small blemish on a fine achievement. Boyett found the right tonality for this delicate novel, which I would not have thought conducive to an audiobook.

7 people found this helpful

Unfathomable Font of Blue: Life's Serial Goodbyes

This one hit home hard. I identified closely with the core of the male character, but I loved it most for its gorgeous profundity. The novel brims with such eloquence on both feeling life's emptiness of meaning and in appealing to life's abundance.

Salter does his damnedest (likely the best I've read) in beautifully depicting the depths of sadness that spring from life's fountain of serial goodbyes, in their many variations: from parents, from loves, from marriage, from children leaving the nest, from friends, from a time and a place and a family in years full of light, and, finally, from life.

Such poignance:

he was **reaching that age, at the edge of it, when the world suddenly becomes more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain, the world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.**

6 people found this helpful

Old school unabashed alpha male

What made the experience of listening to Light Years the most enjoyable?

I love the spare writing style and the unabashed view into the mind of an uncompromised alpha male. It's a rare thing in good literature. Acceptable in MadMen days, but cowed in our age of gender equality. Glad that there is equality, but men and women are NOT the same.

What about Mark Boyett’s performance did you like?

He reflected the personality of the main character very well.

4 people found this helpful

Not my favorite purchase, not my worse...

Story was well written, but it bore me at times. Wasn't excited to find out the end. It took me a while to finish.

2 people found this helpful

A story of ordinary unhappiness

The book covers most of the life of Nedra and Ivri, a middle-class suburban couple with two children. They go through life withouth true values, intimacy and any deep sense of realities. There are hopes (no true passions) and rather trivial dreams (traveling to Europe, glamour , wealth, the sexy secretary..) ; their life fades away and ends almost like a candle that has burned out in the dark. Beautifully written, but unengaging , sad and,at times , almost boring.

5 people found this helpful

Beautiful book and narration

Beautifully written. As good as a Sport and a Pastime, the book Salter believed was his best. This novel will break your heart. In a good way. I read that Salter’s writing style was baroque, out of fashion. Would it interest today’s readers? It should. You will not read better prose. It will touch you. Excellent narration by Mark Boyett.

1 person found this helpful

Salter's fine poetic prose

IA beautiful melancholy novel of a certain time and place, well read. The portrait's are intimate, the mood languorous and the sense of time feels wonderfully real.

The title is perfect: one travels at the speed of light through the full arcs of exquisitely described lives, all the while seeming to moving in slow motion, captivated by minutiae.

Some of the most wonderful sentences in the English language are here.

1 person found this helpful

If chronic adultery and obsession with beauty are

This book is sophisticated? It is beautifully written but the story is all pretentious talk, obsession with beauty, fear of aging and chronic adultery. The random pairings were just depressing. If there was ever a couple that deserved each other it was these two.

A stunningly depressing, beautifully crafted novel

The writing is luminous, the plotting wonderful as it flits from scene to scene, season to season, but if there is a more depressing novel in print, I'd like to know what it is. Numbingly bleak. The outcome seemed an easy way out for an author shooting for profundity. I appreciated this book but did not enjoy a moment of it.

Captures the lives of 1960s New Yorkers

Only the central characters are fully formed. The rest are sketched on the periphery. They may make extended appearances, as the narrative wanders into their stories, but in the main thread comes back to Viri and Nedra. One feels their emotional perspectives keenly, and learns from them. Jhumpa Lahiri has a nice appreciation of this book on-line.