Light Years

Rating:
Summary: My take is different than most reviews
Review: I like this book for reasons others disliked it and cannot rave about it for the reasons that others did.

To begin with, the flowery (but sometimes dark) prose took some getting used to, but I really liked it toward the end. I didn't like the fact that Salter didn't follow gramatical rules many times, such as incomplete sentences, and there were times when I could simply not understand what he was saying.

I was able to enjoy the book, even though the plot was, as one reviewer put it, incidental. Anybody who is looking for action when they read a book will not find it here. However, I have grown to like books about thoughts and emotions on relationships, which seems to be the premise of this novel.

The back of the book leads you to believe that they have this beautiful marriage that has small cracks in it. I never felt that Nedra and Viri had anything more special than a respectful friendship with the responsibility of children, and from the beginning there were no small cracks....there were giant cracks.

In the very first chapter, Nedra is described by another woman as somebody who cares for nobody but herself. Even so, perhaps Nedra is happy with her relationship but not fulfilling to Viri, who looks for happiness elsewhere, and somehow thinks he is deceiving his wife, although for anybody has been in this situation knows that she knows. It is not until then (at least as far as the author shows) that she begins to look for happiness elsewhere. And by some dialogue later in the book between her and Viri, she isn't even trying to hide it.

So, I find this an interesting story of a marriage that falls apart, and I look to it to keep from falling into the same traps, although if Nedra is as self serving as some characters suggest, there would be no avoiding this demise. Just don't make the mistake of thinking the story starts with a beautiful marriage. There are other seemingly disturbed relationships which are described in the book that you wish you could see more of, but it is enough to show that every relationship has it's problems according to Salter. There fails to be one married couple in the book that is hopelessly in love with each other.

As one final note, I may have gone my whole life without disovering Salter and am glad I found him. The reason I found out about him was a character of John Irving's in "A Son of a Circus" was reading "A Salter". I think the author is well worth reading, and intend to read his other works.

Rating:
Summary: Is the reality ever as good as the fantasy?
Review: 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?

Rating:
Summary: Is the reality ever as good as the fantasy?
Review: 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?

Rating:
Summary: Another examination of luxury's disappointment...
Review: James Salter is a very good writer. Anyone who has ever attempted writing knows that language like that found in 'Light Years' is not easily achieved. Unfortuantely, this book is also tremendously boring. It moves at a snail's pace -- deliberate, I'm sure, in showing the slow passage of time. I'm reminded a bit of 'In the Bedroom', a quality film that was rather agonizing to get through. Unlike that film, where the characters were in grief, the characters in this book are really just going through a rather narcissistic, nihilistic realization that life isn't all it could be. I found it difficult to sympathize with their self-indulgence. If luxury is disappointing, try living without it.

Rating:
Summary: A heartbreaking portrayl of a marriage
Review: James Salter takes you so deeply inside the marriage of Nedra and Viri that you know these people as well as your own family before the book is done. It is a heartbreaking portrayl of love that turns to mere companionship. The beautiful wife, Nedra, seeks soemthing she cannot attain from her husband, nor from her affairs, nor from fleeing to Europe. She stands as one of the most completely-drawn women in American ficiton, a modern Madame Bovary. As the husband and wife grow apart, their children become aloof, the house they create falls into disrepair. It is the most accurate portrayl of the joys and sadness of modern marriage that I have read

Rating:
Summary: elegiac portrait of a marriage and its decay
Review: 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. An excellent portrayal of the interior life of a marriage, and the subjects of betrayal and separation, lust, and aging.

Rating:
Summary: Courage
Review: 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 of this work. The small imperfections that erode to fatal flaws as the years pass, the union of marriage that grows old, and regret and a desire for something new becomes an obsession. And if the freedom is regained can it ever be as it was anticipated. How can anything desired for years, embellished and romanticized for decades ever deliver contentment?

The marriage of Nedra and Viri act more like a parenthetical that contains the entire novel and its events, than they serve as the focal point. The dozens of friends on almost as many levels of intimacy all revolve around the married couple, the former couple, or the individuals they believe they become for a second time. Is contentment the equivalent of stagnation; is it predestined for most, or voluntary for the few?

Mr. Salter continues in, "Light Years", what he has done in all 3 of the novels I have read thus far. The people he creates transcend whatever story he presents them in. The personalities he creates are wonderful not because they entertain with their uniqueness or their contrived eccentricities, but because of how normal they are, or perhaps familiar. This is not to suggest they are cliché, they are everything but that, they are people you know, people you may meet, or a character that you find a part of you is within.

One of the beauties of what this man is capable of with his writing is reaching very deeply into the thoughts and fears that inhabit almost all of us. He does not presume, he does not judge or lecture, he just lets you look through your minds eye, and decide for yourself. There are the affairs, but even when the most intimate of acts takes place he handles it in a manner that is clear, pure, evocative, but never does he stoop to the profane. His treatment of the females he writes about is done with respect; he does not objectify the women he writes of even if they seem to offer themselves in a manner that would justify the word object. Males and females are flawed, they err, and they can seek answers and redemption, and again he lets you decide, he does not hand down Judgement.

This is an amazing writer that I either missed, or many have, as his is some of the best work I have ever read. Comparisons are really unnecessary, take what you like about your favorite writers, and you will find something to love in this man's work.

Rating:
Summary: If you want to know what "luminous" means....
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: rediscover your senses.
Review: this book will remind you of what it is to feel passion, to see things for the first time, to understand beauty.

Rating:
Summary: a favorite
Review: 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.