I had difficulties getting into this book. Mainly, this is the fault of the peculiar construction. There’s a first-person narrator, probably the author himself. He seems to be the main protagonist at first. But isn’t which it took me some time to learn. Instead, it’s about Dean and Anne and their love affair somewhere in France. The way this is told, you never get close to them. You see them through the eyes of the narrator but at the same time you are so close to them when they make love that it just couldn’t be told by the narrator. Also, the narrator occasionally breaks the fourth wall and adresses the reader directly, making clear that all of this is made up and invented by him.
Two central quotes frame the narrative. One is the title ‚A Sport and a Pastime‘ which is supposed to be from the Koran and refers to life on this earth being merely this. The other is the final passage:
As for Anne-Marie, she lives in Troyes now, or did. She is married. I suppose there are children. They walk together on Sundays, the sunlight falling upon them. They visit friends, talk, go home in the evening, deep in the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired.
In between these two juxtapositions, the narrator is caught. He greatly admires Dean and his hedonistic aimless enjoyment of life which is what he wants to do. On the other hand, he obeys to the common virtues Anne-Marie finally submits to. Once I understood this construction, my enjoyment of the novel greatly increased. In hindsight, it’s one of the most intimate stories I ever read with the outstanding achievement that it’s full of sex without ever being cringeworthy.