A Sport and a Pastime - Tapa blanda

'A Sport and a Pastime ... Slender, cynical and bruisingly sexy, the novel represents the first full flowering of [Salter's] mature style; his exquisite sentences and extraordinary evocation of place. Daily Telegraph 'Two of his previous novels [including] A Sport and a Pastime, from 1967, are regarded as classics ... The writer Reynolds Price also thought A Sport and a Pastime "perfect",' Irish Times 'Now deemed canonical ... A Sport and a Pastime [is] still one of the most intensely honest books about sexual passion.' Sunday Times

Touring Paris and provincial France in a handsome borrowed car, Philip Dean, Yale dropout, has an affair with a young French woman named Anne-Marie. Their liaison is imagined with candour and sensitivity by an unnamed narrator, whose fantasies become compellingly and hauntingly real. A Sport and A Pastime has been hailed as a watershed in American fiction of the 1960s: remarkable for its eroticism, its luminous prose and its ability to blur the boundaries of reality and dreamlife, daytime and nightime, soul and flesh. 'A tour de force in erotic realism, a romantic cliffhanger, an opaline vision of Americans in France' New York Times 'Salter is the contemporary writer most admired and envied by other writers . . . he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence' Washington Post