The book on the nightstand: A perfect happiness

It was an autumn evening in 1958, when Viri and Nedra await guests for dinner along with the daughters, Franca and Diane. “A perfect happiness” seems to inhabit their Victorian house on the banks of the Hudson just outside New York: the protagonists are surrounded by intellectually stimulating friends, good music, fancy books and fine dining but appearances are deceptive
as often happens. The joy is fleeting and melancholy makes its way page after page by wrapping the mind of the reader who discovers – or perhaps he already knows – there’s no perfection in this world. On the surface of this marriage glimpsed the first cracks: starting with the 28-year-old Nedra, a confident woman adorned by dreams “which still has sticking to her skin” and Viri “a jew of the most elegant, the most romantic with a hint of weakness in the features, smart features that all envy “.

James Salter zooms on the life of those young bourgeois couple digging up their silences, betrayals and lies with a detailed and enticing prose: “their life was two things: it was a life, more or less – at very least it was the preparedness for a true life – and it was an illustration of life for their daughters. They neve told each other, but they both agreed, and these two versions were interlaced, in so far as one remain submerged, while the other is revealed. ”

No couple is immune from what the author describes, but in love “do we really have only one season? one summer? (…) and then it’s just over? “. The “light years” – as title said – should be possible to be more of a memory, they should be the light that lights up life that we’ve chosen.

Time of reading: a week