Negra and Viri are a married couple whose favoured life is centred 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 fine cracks are beginning to spread through the shimmering surface of their life - flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, tender and resonant, "Light Years" is an exquisite novel of lost lives and the elusiveness of happiness.
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'A sensitive author who is romantic, intelligent and superbly balanced' Joseph Heller
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
James Salter is the author of the novels Solo Faces, Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime, The Arm of Flesh (revised as Cassada), and The Hunters; the memoirs Gods of Tin and Burning the Days; and the collection, Dusk and Other Stories which won the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award. He lives in Colorado and on Long Island. Richard Ford (b. 1944) is a well-known Mississippi writer, winner of both the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize in Literature for his novel Independence Day. His earlier works include A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, Fifty Great Years of Esquire Fiction, Wildlife, and The Sportswriter.
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Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
Format:Paperback
This is one of my favorite novels--and one I recommend over and over to friends. Salter's prose is beautiful, limpid, and elegant, and his portrait of life in New York is exquisitely precise, even painful. Each page is full of the kind of sentences you want to write down. It's a novel that has to be read anyone who loves language.
Format:Paperback
The main characters are named Viri and Nedra, and Lord knows that signals "pretentious." Ignore all that. No one writes about what happens between men and women better than Salter; you can see your own relationships in the 308 pages it takes to track the glory and fall of this marriage between an architect and his thin, troubled wife. And the sense of place! Here he is on the lure the Hamptons held for Nedra: "She was a creature of blue, flawless days, the sun of their noons hot as the African coast, the chill of the nights immense and clear." I started the book in that place on a morning so grey the sky and ocean merged; I read through the rain; I finished at night. A day well spent.
By *Q*
Format:Paperback
I'd give this book 4 1/2 stars if I could!! This book knocked my socks off. This is not unusual material, every other book is about fading relationships. Salter describes the every day life of the married couple, Nedra and Viri whom are acting out a marriage rather than being in it. Their affections wandering and alienated. The content is sad but so eloquently displayed before you that you sometimes forget the seriousness of the plot. Oh, and then those beautiful dancing words.... taking you completly by surprise. Salter paints scenic backgrounds where daily life exists, such as in Chapter 2 it begins;
In the morning the light came is silence. The house slept. The air overhead, glittering, it's richness, it's density, bathe in the air like a stream.
The character's were annoying because they had a wonderful life but they just couldn't see it, they seemed immature and non committal. Both of them cheated not only on each other but on themselves.
The question is, is the reality ever as good as the fantasy?
In the morning the light came is silence. The house slept. The air overhead, glittering, it's richness, it's density, bathe in the air like a stream.
The character's were annoying because they had a wonderful life but they just couldn't see it, they seemed immature and non committal. Both of them cheated not only on each other but on themselves.
The question is, is the reality ever as good as the fantasy?
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4.1 out of 5 stars
Most recent customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
elegiac portrait of a marriage and its decay
Like Salter's other books and stories, Light Years is elegiac and haunting. Captures a feeling for a time in post-WWII America when hopes were high, all things seemed possible. Read more
Published on July 13 2001 by Wayne Ralph
5.0 out of 5 stars
Courage
The courage to live life as it changes, as the faults that went unseen in the initial rush of novelty emerge, to adapt, continue and be happy, content, this I believe is the heart... Read more
Published on Feb 13 2001 by taking a rest
5.0 out of 5 stars
perfect prose
Simply put, this is the the most lyrical and stylistically perfect American novel since _The Great Gatsby_. Read it and re-read it, recommend it to friends. Read more
Published on Sep 13 2000
2.0 out of 5 stars
ghost characters
Salter's poetic prose at times reads too precious. Characters come and go, are left behind- vanish, in a picaresque of loss and despair. Read more
Published on Mar 18 2000
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poetry in prose
Not a traditionally told story, the plot is almost entirely incidental. What we are left with is the language, lyrical and beautiful, that can veer from a description of a family... Read more
Published on Aug 20 1999
4.0 out of 5 stars
Profoundly moving
I read this book while vacationing in Italy and attempting to cope with my divorce, a sudden and unexpected loss in my life. This book will knock you out. You'll never forget it.
Published on July 10 1999 by michael r. harty
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful novel
A wonderfully-written, poignant portrait of a marriage. The end filled me with sadness and the chapters were consistently memorable. Read more
Published on Jun 28 1999
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Death of a Marriage Described in Lyrical Prose
This novel, set in the period between the mid 1950s and mid 1970s in New York, is the story of the marriage of well-off Viri and Nedra. Read more
Published on April 8 1999
4.0 out of 5 stars
A lightly woven filigree of regret.
Much less of a story than a lingering retrospective gaze at the subtle astonishments that have come to populate a life, giving it the plenitude towards which it has helplessly... Read more
Published on April 4 1999
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I love you as I love the earth, white buildings..."
"...photographs, noons. I adore you." Viri makes up these lines to his lover, Kaya. How do I express this-- what I hold in me of this book? Read more
Published on Jun 29 1998
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