Burning the Days
recollection
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Review by Roger Bishop
"Life passes into pages if it passes into anything," James Salter has written. The pages of his own beautifully crafted novels and short stories -- "A Sport and a Pastime," "Light Years," "Solo Faces," "Dusk and Other Stories" -- have many admirers, including fellow authors Reynolds Price, Joy Williams, Elizabeth Benedict and John Irving. Now Salter, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988, has produced an extraordinary memoir, "Burning the Days: Recollection," which he describes as "more or less the story of a life." Although he says he found it difficult to write about himself, that was not obvious to this reader, perhaps because the quality of the writing is so exceptional.
This is not a conventional memoir. It has a chronological structure, but is not tied firmly to it. The reader learns almost nothing of the writer's domestic life, his wives or children, save when a terrible tragedy occurs. His approach is often episodic, impressionistic, yet regardless of the people involved, or whether the setting is Paris, Rome or elsewhere, the essence of the experience is captured.
During the early 1960s, Salter writes that he was "under the spell of books which were brief but every page of which was exalted, Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury' or 'As I Lay Dying.' This sort of book, like those of Flannery O'Connor, Marguerite Duras, Camus, remains my favorite . . . For me the shorter novels show it best." Although it is a memoir, I felt the same sense of exaltation about this book.
Roger Bishop is contributing editor to BookPage.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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