James Salter

A Sport and a Pastime is an astonishing performance, the classic novel from a remarkable writer whose sentences bristle with a singular passion. Salter chronicles a love affair between a young shopgirl and an American college dropout against the backdrop of provincial France. The narrator's cool distillation of events-real or imagined-makes the book both lyrical and tightly, dangerously pitched.

A Sport and a Pastime

Sarah Christine Gill

Finally we emerge at the roaring, iron galleries where meat is handled. It's like coming upon a factory in the darkness. The overhead lights are blazing. The smell of carnage is everywhere, the very metal reeks with an odor denser than flowers. On the sidewalk there are wheelbarrows of slaughtered heads. It's right out of Franju and that famous work which literally steams of it. We stare down at the dumb victims. There are scores of them. The mouths are pink, the nostrils still moist. Worn knives with the edge of a razor have flensed them while their eyes were still fluttering, the huge, eloquent eyes of young calves. The bloody arms of the workers sketch quickly. Wherever they move, the skin magically parts, the warm insides pour out. Everything is swiftly divided. An animal which two minutes ago was led to them has now disappeared. 

I walk back. In the streets there is an absolute silence, not a car moving, not a person. In the pale sky there are no birds. It's like entering the past. Nothing is altered. Nothing makes a noise. On the corner, in the window of a café they sometimes go to, a cat is sleeping, a huge cat, soft as a dream. I pause there, awake before the city. I think of walking along the river, but my whole body is like dry wood. I turn down the street on which they ive, a wide street, blue and empty, empty sidewalks as far as I can see.

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