James Salter

Rand lives free; lean, pure and defiant, the world has little influence on him. His passion is climbing – the mountains, the huge vertical faces. There, where storms, snow, or rockfall can kill, he finds his happiness, sometimes climbing with others, sometimes alone. This is a novel of obsession and where it leads. Rand, not intending it, becomes suddenly famous for a daring rescue in the Alps. What happens when passion is spent and what becomes of heroes is revealed in this terse and powerfully written novel.

Solo Faces

Absurdly perfect. The whole book is like this. 

Sarah Christine Gill

THEY WERE AT WORK on the roof of the church. All day from above, from a sea of light where two white crosses crowned twin domes, voices came floating down as well as occasional pieces of wood, nails, and once in the dreamlike air a coin that seemed to flash, disappear and then shine again for an endless time before it met the ground. Beneath the eucalyptus branches a signboard covered with glass announced the Sunday sermon: Sexuality and God.

He stood and watched his companion work, steady, unhurried. The roof was shimmering, hidden in light. Far below were the doors through which women, spied on from above, had gone in and out all day. A sale was being held in the basement. On the next level, aisles and benches—he had never actually been in a church, he tried to imagine what was said there, how one behaved. Above it, he and Rand. It was all one great angelic order. Flesh, spirit, gods. Wages, three dollars an hour.

ABOVE LOS ANGELES THE faint sound of traffic hung like haze. The air had a coolness, an early clarity. The wind was coming from the sea which as much as anything gives the city its aura. A benign light flooded down, onto the shops, the awnings, the leaves of every tree. It fell on lavish homes and driveways and into the faded back streets where houses with five-digit numbers languished beneath great names: Harlow Avenue, Ince Way. There are two Los Angeleses, they like to say, sometimes more, but in fact there is only one, six lanes wide with distant palms and one end vanishing in the sea. 

“We’d have to be in very good shape.” 

“For what?” Cabot waited, “The Dru,” he said. 

A single granite face, gray and isolated, it almost seemed to shift forward in Rand’s mind, detach itself from the landscape and become even more distinct. Dark, with black lines weeping down it, a Babylonian temple smashed by centuries, its pillars and passages sheared away, the huge fragments floating through thousands of feet of air to explode on the lower slabs, legendary, un-climbable for decades: the Dru.

It was the year when everything beckons, when one is finally loved. The clippings were folded and put away. He pretended to scorn them. He kept them despite himself. The true form of legend, he believed, was spoken. He did not want to be catalogued in newspapers, he said, read and discarded like sports scores and crimes.

He felt solitary, deep, like a fish in a river, mouth closed, uncaught, glistening against the flow. He saw himself at forty, working for wages, walking home in the dusk. The windows of restaurants, the headlights of cars, shops just being closed, all of it part of a world he had never surrendered to, that he would defy to the end.

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