
Light Years
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Narrated by:
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Mark Boyett
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By:
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James Salter
This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered 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 even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness - and then felt compelled to destroy it.
©1975 James Salter (P)2014 Audible Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















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Beautiful story!
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Captures the lives of 1960s New Yorkers
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For me, this is perfect in every way.
Reading the Lives of Others
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Beautiful book and narration
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A stunningly depressing, beautifully crafted novel
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Not my favorite purchase, not my worse...
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James Salter, The Light Years
This is a book that is beautifully written—a perfect book to recommend to English Majors who don’t mind whether their literary fiction stories come with plots or not.
Me? Well, I appreciate its craft, and certainly its numerous (seemingly effortless) poetic moments, but (call me a simple Sally!) I *like* plot. There were moments of intense focus—several—but I kept wondering if this should have been a selection of short stories instead. The chapters were episodic; I lost track of names and relationships—places, ages—it covered a long span of time.
I enjoyed its strange ending, even as it annoyed me as driving a manual transmission annoys me when it jerks and stalls if you stop paying attention to the clutch. The book demands that you pay attention, even as its own mind wanders. The characters are not really likable, which also makes it hard to bond with the multiple points of view.
I’m glad I read it. Maybe I will come back to it. It was published in 1975, a time of peak disillusionment of marriages forged by values that generation no longer felt. An uncomfortable disintegration to witness. This novel spares no one.
File Under: Fiction Writers’ Fiction
English Major Fiction
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If chronic adultery and obsession with beauty are
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The narrator Mark Boyett, is very good in all the important ways--his rhythm is just right, he evokes the different characters (with their many foreign accents) nicely, and he doesn't moon over the lyrical sections. My only gripe is that he mispronounces foreign words from time to time, a pet peeve of mine: he says "restina" for "retsina," for example, puts the wrong accent on the Italian word "facile..." You get the picture. It's a small blemish on a fine achievement. Boyett found the right tonality for this delicate novel, which I would not have thought conducive to an audiobook.
Elegant and elusive
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Salter does his damnedest (likely the best I've read) in beautifully depicting the depths of sadness that spring from life's fountain of serial goodbyes, in their many variations: from parents, from loves, from marriage, from children leaving the nest, from friends, from a time and a place and a family in years full of light, and, finally, from life.
Such poignance:
he was **reaching that age, at the edge of it, when the world suddenly becomes more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain, the world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.**
Unfathomable Font of Blue: Life's Serial Goodbyes
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