Light Years

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by James Salter


  He was wearing a gray suit bought in Rome. He walked slowly. The soles of his shoes grew dark with moisture. The trees were huge and without lower branches. They had died and fallen while the crown sought the light. Damp, buried, they broke beneath his feet. He saw the faded flag of a surveyor’s stake; further on, forgotten, a children’s fort. Nearby was a hammer, rusted, its handle eaten by worms. Every step he took bristled with the sound of twigs and branches, the debris of years. He tried the hammer, the handle snapped. In the silence birds were calling. There were tiny flies in the air. Above, in the far sunlight, the roar of airliners bound for Europe.

  The fort had fallen, the children were gone. They had hidden in these woods, had lain among the small wild flowers. Hadji had rolled in the snow, bathing in it, squirming on his back and pausing, fragrant beast, eyes dark as coffee, smiling mouth. Those afternoons that would never vanish, all ended. He, resettled. His daughters, gone.

  An old man in the woods, his thoughts flashed forward as quickly as they had gone back. He walked with slow, careful steps, his gaze to the ground. He saw something then, domed and wondrous. He stopped in disbelief. How it had escaped the cars, the keen eyes of children, of dogs, he could not understand, but somehow it had. It was the tortoise. It had not seen him, he watched it going its way, rustling the leaves as it walked. He bent and picked it up. The reptilian face, impassive, wise, acknowledged nothing; the pale eye, clear as a bead, seemed anxious to look away. The powerful legs were curving their strokes at his fingers, but in vain. Finally it withdrew into its shell on which, faint as weathered writing on a board, the initials were scratched. He could barely make them out. He wet a finger and rubbed; miraculously they became plain. He put the tortoise down, he was reluctant to. He watched it for a while. It did not move.

  It seemed the woods were breathing, that they had recognized him, made him their own. He sensed the change. He was moved as if deeply grateful. The blood sprang within him, rushed from his head.

  He walks toward the river, placing his feet carefully. His suit is too warm and tight. He reaches the water’s edge. There is the dock, unused now, with its flaking paint and rotten boards, its underpilings drenched in green. Here at the great, dark river, here on the bank.

  It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.

  Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last.

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  POSSESSION

  by A. S. Byatt

  An intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.

  “Gorgeously written … a tour de force.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Winner of the Booker Prize

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  THE STRANGER

  by Albert Camus

  Through the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder, Camus explores what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

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  INVISIBLE MAN

  by Ralph Ellison

  This searing record of a black man’s journey through contemporary America reveals, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region.”

  “The greatest American novel in the second half of the twentieth century … the classic representation of American black experience.”

  —R.W. B. Lewis

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  THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

  by Kazuo Ishiguro

  A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England.

  “One of the best books of the year.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

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  ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

  by Cormac McCarthy

  At sixteen, John Grady Cole finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

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  —Washington Post Book World

  Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

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  BUDDENBROOKS

  THE DECLINE OF A FAMILY

  by Thomas Mann

  Translated by John E. Woods

  This masterpiece is an utterly absorbing chronicle of four generations of a German mercantile family. As Thomas Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline, he creates a world of exuberant vitality and almost Rabelaisian earthiness.

  “Wonderfully fresh and elegant … bound to become the definitive English version.”

  —Los Angeles Times

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  LOLITA

  by Vladimir Nabokov

  The famous and controversial novel that tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.

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  —Vanity Fair

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  THE ENGLISH PATIENT

  by Michael Ondaatje

  During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion, recollection and observation is woven.

  “It seduces and beguiles us with its many-layered mysteries, its brilliantly taut and lyrical prose, its tender regard for its characters.”

  —Newsday

  Winner of the Booker Prize

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  OPERATION SHYLOCK

  by Philip Roth

  In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, and it is up to Roth to stop him—even if that means impersonating his impersonator.

  “A diabolically clever, engaging work …the result is a kind of dizzying exhilaration.”

  —Boston Globe

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  C
hapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Five

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

 

 

 


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