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Summary
Summary
In this brilliant book of recollection, one of America's finest writers re-creates people, places, and events spanning some fifty years, bringing to life an entire era through one man's sensibility. Scenes of love and desire, friendship, ambition, life in foreign cities and New York, are unforgettably rendered here in the unique style for which James Salter is widely admired. Burning the Days captures a singular life, beginning with a Manhattan boyhood and then, satisfying his father's wishes, graduation from West Point, followed by service in the Air Force as a pilot. In some of the most evocative pages ever written about flying, Salter describes the exhilaration and terror of combat as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, scenes that are balanced by haunting pages of love and a young man's passion for women. After resigning from the Air Force, Salter begins a second life, becoming a writer in the New York of the 1960s. Soon films beckon. There are vivid portraits of actors, directors, and producers--Polanski, Robert Redford, and others. Here also, more important, are writers who were influential, some by their character, like Irwin Shaw, others because of their taste and knowledge. Ultimately Burning the Days is an illumination of what it is to be a man, and what it means to become a writer. Only once in a long while--Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory or Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa--does a memoir of such extraordinary clarity and power appear. Unconventional in form, Burning the Days is a stunning achievement by the writer The Washington Post Book World said "inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O'Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever" --a rare and unforgettable book.
Author Notes
James Arnold Horowitz (June 10, 1925 - June 19, 2015), better known as James Salter, his pen name and later-adopted legal name, was an American novelist and short-story writer. Originally a career officer and pilot in the United States Air Force, he resigned from the military in 1957 following the successful publication of his first novel, The Hunters.
Salter published a collection of short stories, Dusk and Other Stories in 1988. The collection received the PEN/Faulkner Award, and one of its stories ("Twenty Minutes") became the basis for the 1996 film, Boys. He was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000. In 2012, PEN/Faulkner Foundation selected him for the 25th PEN/Malamud Award.
Salter Died on June 19, 2015. He was 90.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Members of a generation nearing its end are passing along memoirs that remind Americans how innocent life was before 1945, how grand immediately after. And Salter commands a position near the head of this class for his unfaltering skill as a writer and intuitive sensitivity as a chronicler of human relationships. Though he fought in Korea, not WWII, he describes the same postwar euphoria that existed when Americans felt beloved by the world. The bulk of this brilliant memoir recounts the 1940s, '50s and '60s, when Salter was a fighter pilot, then a novelist (Light Years) and writer of screenplays. Combat missions and military culture (Salter graduated from West Point) are described in detail, along with the exotic locales of his Air Force career: the American Midwest, Asia, North Africa. But it is Europe that still enthralls him, and the pages recounting his friendships there with "performers whom the years had yet to deplume" (Irwin Shaw, Roman Polanski) are the most heartrending. Salter fans will recognize the theme of once mighty worlds decaying to insignificance. Everything in this book is colored with the sweet sadness of lossloss of friends, lovers and dreams. Salter writes about tragedy and regret with irresistible eloquence. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Glimpses of a writer's past, given as though discreetly decanted. This memoir by the New York novelist (Solo Faces, 1979, etc.) and short-story writer feels more like a first-person elegy, with all the poignancy available to one who writes in advance of life's closing. A sadness, half-suppressed in the telling, flows through the pages. The tone is most persuasive whenever Salter's story itself takes melancholy turns--when, for instance, he writes of his editor-friend Ben Sonnenberg's decline from multiple sclerosis or when he alludes to his difficulties and failures as a writer. But at times the narrator seems to long to absent himself from the narrative, perhaps to escape the pain inherent in anyone's excavation of his past. At these times, lacking an integral structure, the writing loses momentum. And although the book is packed with characters--from Irwin Shaw to Robert Redford to scads of femmes fatales, portrayed with a courtly tact--it seems too often to depend on scenes and observations saturated with a rather dated literary perfume. The scent bears traces of Hemingway's literary stoicism and Fitzgerald's lyric delicacy. Many of the continental settings and scenes belong to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, too, especially those involving wartime (the West Pointeducated Salter was a pilot) and Paris, where his reveries of wine, women, and belles lettres are generically familiar to a fault. Women are in general a weak point for Salter here, rarely seeming more than seductive ghosts. For instance, he writes condescendingly of Sharon Tate that ``if she was not a very good housekeeper, she was pure of heart and her flesh was a poem. One felt that she could be enjoyed in all the ways that one can enjoy a woman.'' Though almost too patrician to be true, the book includes descriptions and characterizations that demonstrate how good Salter can be when he dispenses with his courtly reserve. A connoisseur's view of himself and others. (Author tour)
Booklist Review
"In a book of recollection, much is reduced to ruin. Things are captured and at the same time drained of life, never to shimmer or give back light again." Oddly, it is this very ambivalence about memoirs that gives Salter's "recollection" much of its special appeal. Author of the much-loved short novel A Sport and a Pastime (1967), Salter remembers what he wants to remember of his long and varied life, producing an episodic, meditative, melancholy book that somehow manages to evoke, quite poignantly, the tentative way we all remember and forget. Those who know Salter only from the crystalline eroticism of Sport and a Pastime will be surprised to learn that he is a West Point graduate and former Korean War fighter pilot. In fact, it is the flying sequences and the reflections on military life, more even than his captivating reminiscences of carousing with Irwin Shaw in Paris or John Huston in Rome, that display Salter's prose at its precise best. Salter may be burning his days, but he's built a terrific bonfire. --Bill Ott
Library Journal Review
A "writer's writer," despite his Sport and a Pastime's inclusion in the Modern Library, the 72-year-old Salter uses his autobiography not to bathe in the glow of celebrity names (in fact, he makes a point of using noms de plume) but, rather, to discover the overall trajectory of his life thus fara purpose that perhaps accounts for the book's unwavering tone of humility, candor, and authenticity. A graduate of West Point, where he experienced an emotional about-face from rebellious would-be drop-out to a young man eager to be tested in combat, Salter was trained as a fighter pilot in the mid-1940s but saw combat against the scary Russian MIG-15s in Korea in the early 1950s. Throughout, his writing styletight, lyrical, and insightfulcalls attention to itself. This is a writer's textbook, a sheer pleasure, and the descriptions of flying are perhaps the most vivid yet written. After leaving the Air Force (there are no old jet fighter pilots), Salter gravitated to Europe for its older and more resonant culture. There he met the failing Irwin Shaw and wrote film scripts before graduating to fiction (e.g., Dusk and Other Stories, LJ 1/88). The flavors of four decades are here. Highly recommended for all libraries.Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.