[Download] "James Salter's "am Strande von Tanger" (Critical Essay)" by Notes on Contemporary Literature # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: James Salter's "am Strande von Tanger" (Critical Essay)
- Author : Notes on Contemporary Literature
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 52 KB
Description
The title of James Salter's first story, "Am Strande von Tanger" (On the Beach at Tangier), alludes to a landscape by the Bohemian artist Wenzel Hollar (1607-77). It first appeared in the Paris Review (Fall 1968) and, twenty years later, opened his collection Dusk (1988). The tale, written in his distinctively precise and lyrical style, begins with a bold yet simple sentence fragment, "Barcelona at dawn," that contrasts to the title of the book in which it appears (James Salter, Dusk and Other Stories, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988, p. 3). It takes place on one long, eighteen-hour day, from dawn to midnight. Three young expatriates--Malcolm, an American, and two Germans, his girlfriend Nico and her friend Inge--have been drifting about rather aimlessly and find themselves in a pivotal moment of change. Salter uses a subtle and allusive technique to replicate the delicate shifts in their lives. Like Hemingway, Salter always describes the setting and the weather, the atmosphere of the city and seascape that surrounds it. At Sitges, a beach resort twenty miles down the coast from Barcelona, Malcolm listens with intense interest and heightened imagination as Inge takes an outdoor shower: "He can hear the soft slap and passage of her hands, the sudden shattering of the water on concrete when she moves aside" (14). When they drive home with the sunroof open, the night is "so dense with stars that they seem to be pouring into the car" (17). Salter's style, with its vivid details and ineffable suggestiveness, evokes a mood that creates meaning. As he writes in another story, "The Cinema," "Beneath the visible were emotions more potent for their concealment" (76).