Frank Foley
Frank Foley
LIGHT YEARS
Salter, James
Published: 1975
Category: Novel
Themes: life, in its fragmented unity; love, identity, and the impossibility of being oneself; family, togetherness and separation; the underlying poetry of life.
Overview
Salter's beautiful, sometimes brutal novel is as close as prose can get to being poetry, whilst still remaining prose! This is a wonderful novel, full of passion, and the deft touches of life; a novel to be savoured, slowly.
Frank's highlight!
I'm going to cheat again, for there are so many moments! I love the Berland's horse, Ursula, whose ear to the touch is, "warm, strong as a shoe." ~ The Berland children, very young, outside the bathroom door, listening to their father's tall tales - the way they confer and decide they are true. ~ Nedra and Jivan's lovemaking ~ Conrad, the tailor ~ the poetic cadence that runs throughout the book! (see quote below)
Life-affirming / uplifting message
For me the book seems to suggest that there is an underlying poetry to life, some kind of rhythmic, poetic structure, the beat of life, perhaps, that we constantly try to find expression for in language, literature, music and art. Light Year is one such point of expression, and with all art, it is flawed and beautiful.
Life wisdom
Life is infinitely complicated, multilayered, and not in our control. Awareness of this opens us to its richness and poetry. Light Years is like an offering, an homage, a gesture of hospitality in the face of life's deep complex beauty and brutality. We don't read it for analysis or description, we read it to bathe in the poetry of the human spirit.
A Personal Note
I came across Light Years, as with so many of the literary gems I find, on the shelf of a charity shop, and it looked like it had been there a while. But from the moment I opened that first page, and saw those opening lines - "We dash the black river, its flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white." - with their rhythm and cadence, I was in love ... which is apt because this is the novel as passionate love-letter to life. Yes, life in all its unpenetrable mystery. The mystery that sits beneath the surface of the everyday, the familiar.
Quoted passages
QUOTE 1: "There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams ... one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea. We had children, he thought; we can never be childless. We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives..."