Cassada

Rating:
Summary: AN EXTRAORDINARY GRIPPING NOVEL
Review: I had never heard of James Salter... from the first page I knew I had made an investment of extraordinary value.

Yes, it's about flying, but more than that, it's about the people in and around the airplanes. Writing about a piece of aluminum with an engine in front of it will keep my attention for a page, and that's it, but with Salter we get a master story teller who gets behind the machinery and into the heart and soul of everyone involved.

It's almost scary, and its also a masterpiece.

I read it in one sitting, I couldn't put it down, and was emotionally drained by the last page.

There wasn't one scene, one sentence that didn't fell right on.

Now I hae to find out what else Salter has written, he's that good!

Rating:
Summary: Minimalist prose, stunted character development
Review: Michael Dirda of the Washington Post writes of James Salter, "He can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence." I unfortunately did not come across any such sentence in Cassada, Salter's re-write of one of his early, unsuccessful novels. Salter certainly has a distinguishing prose style, which some will find appealing. His is very much the minimalist approach to writing, and progressing through this text conjures images of traveling through a barren desert. Terse sentences and short chapters are the defining characteristics of his prose, noticeably void of lengthy descriptive passages or flowery imagery.

Of course, there is nothing wrong, per se, with this style of writing. Hemingway was the master of minimalist prose, rarely inserting a superfluous adjective, simile, or metaphor. But in Salter's case, it seems that more words may have helped to add depth to characters that clearly have the potential to engage the reader but unfortunately fall short. Cassada, the central figure in this novel, is an air force pilot based in Europe shortly after World War II. He has all the essentials of an intriguing character - talent, determination, cockiness, self-destructive stubbornness, and a tragic end - but there simply is not enough prose to truly make the reader feel a bond with him. Think of how you felt when Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt met his tragic end in From Here to Eternity. You just don't feel that way about Cassada.

Which is not to say that this book is without merit. It is engrossing at points, and Salter has few rivals in his ability to describe the experiences of a military pilot. And it is precisely in that vein that his prose style becomes effective, for his sparse passages adeptly portray the lonely yet bold nature of his characters.

Rating:
Summary: Minimalist prose, stunted character development
Review: Michael Dirda of the Washington Post writes of James Salter, "He can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence." I unfortunately did not come across any such sentence in Cassada, Salter's re-write of one of his early, unsuccessful novels. Salter certainly has a distinguishing prose style, which some will find appealing. His is very much the minimalist approach to writing, and progressing through this text conjures images of traveling through a barren desert. Terse sentences and short chapters are the defining characteristics of his prose, noticeably void of lengthy descriptive passages or flowery imagery.

Of course, there is nothing wrong, per se, with this style of writing. Hemingway was the master of minimalist prose, rarely inserting a superfluous adjective, simile, or metaphor. But in Salter's case, it seems that more words may have helped to add depth to characters that clearly have the potential to engage the reader but unfortunately fall short. Cassada, the central figure in this novel, is an air force pilot based in Europe shortly after World War II. He has all the essentials of an intriguing character - talent, determination, cockiness, self-destructive stubbornness, and a tragic end - but there simply is not enough prose to truly make the reader feel a bond with him. Think of how you felt when Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt met his tragic end in From Here to Eternity. You just don't feel that way about Cassada.

Which is not to say that this book is without merit. It is engrossing at points, and Salter has few rivals in his ability to describe the experiences of a military pilot. And it is precisely in that vein that his prose style becomes effective, for his sparse passages adeptly portray the lonely yet bold nature of his characters.

Rating:
Summary: dangerous reading
Review: Reading Salter is a high risk sport. Every sentence is a step into the unknown. Each one is a potential hazard. Whether he writes about flying fighter-jets, or about a marriage ("Light Years"), or an unforgettable lay ("A Sport and a Pastime"). One reason for this, and it makes Salter's writing inimitable, is that every sentence is perfect to the point where it seems to exist in a vacuum. Stepping from one to the other, you face nothingness. Maybe that's what people mean when they say that his writing is "ecstatic." Salter's sentences are objects of beauty. It still makes not one of them harmless. Some of them will stay with you forever. That's part of the risk. "Cassada" is a rewriting of an earlier novel (which I have not read). It's somewhat cinematic structure - juxtaposing tense chapters in which an avoidable disaster unremittingly unfolds, and chapters which proceed, in orderly chronological flash-backs, to tell about the hero's insertion into a fighter squadron, and to flesh out characters and relationships, firmly situates the book as a production of the Sixties. While the crisis itself seemingly develops out of external circumstances - the weather, materiel failure, multi-level goofing - its tragic outcome is set up in those flash-back chapters where Cassada, a perfectly decent sort, ambitious, umbrageous, a bit too refined, is given a hard time by his comrades and superiors, and most of all by Salter himself who, intent on not letting him acquire heroic dimension, puts him through one humiliating situation after another. The pettiness, triteness of the life of the squadron, the frailty of its members, conveyed serenely, pitilessly, à la Salter, make it clear that the book is not intent on a celebration of the human spirit. You won't find a shred of sentimentality here. Yet, in the unbelievably gripping last chapters, the ultimate little nudge which brings about the tragedy will come, not from the nastiness, but from the feelings of friendship and esteem, often unspoken, from the slight excess of loyalty which, at the moment of truth, they call forth. Love is the surest killer (the leitmotiv in Salter's work). When life or death is a matter of split second decisions, any human impulse is fatefully magnified - a point which flying is ideally suited to illustrate. None of the protagonists, or the investigating commission, is ever likely to know the true cause of the death of the Hero, nor how exactly it came to happen, but we do, and it makes the novel singularly satisfying. Because flying remains the emblematic human breakthrough of the 20th century, and because Salter is one of the century's masters of the language, "Cassada" cannot escape the fate of becoming a classic. For the pure ecstacy of the flying experience, though, you must read "Burning the Days," Salter's autobiography.