Customer Reviews

Cassada

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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"Cassada," is a re-write by James Salter, of his highly acclaimed 1961 novel, "The Arm of Flesh." I have always considered "The Arm of Flesh, " the best book I have ever read about the interpersonnal relationships within an Air Force Fighter Squadron, and I was a fighter pilot one for twenty years. Even though some major changes have been made in plot and some characters in "Cassada," the story still retains that ellusive element of putting you there, as a participant, or observer. The story opens with a missed approach to the home base in Germany, by two of the squadron aircraft in terrible weather conditions, and through beatufully paced flashbacks, the story fills in and unfolds to a gripping climax. If you enjoy reading about military aviation, I can't recommend this book highly enough. If you just enjoy superb writing, I still can't recommend this book highly enough. It is a winner!

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.

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!

...with which he was dissatisfied and, many years later, revised. It is spare and precise and captivating. Salter is one of America's finest authors.

I just discovered James Salter 2 months ago. There was a quote on the back of this edition of Cassada which said something like "Salter is a writer whose works I want to read one after another". So true. Cassada is my third Salter novel (I started with Light Years and A Sport and a Pastime), and I was n no way disappointed. The book is extremely dfferent from the two just mentioned, but Salter's language is still there.

Gonna go find me some more by this brilliant writer who Ive overlooked for far too long.

While not the very best by Salter, it is still a classic. No one writes like James Salter.

Anytime you find yourself enjoying the writing more than the reading of a story, you can't give the book a 4 or 5 star rating. Much like noticing an actor acting instead of them engaging you in the character they are suppossed to be playing.

Cassada is a good solid book. A man's book for sure. And I enjoyed it, but for anyone looking for an all out engrossing read, where they fall into the story and fall into the characters, this ain't it. If you want to read great writing, this is it. For both read James Salter's *Sport and a Pastime* or Tim O'Brien's *Tomcat in Love*.

Cassada is not quite a new novel. On the other hand it's not a revision of an old novel either. Instead it's a complete rewriting of an earlier novel, The Arm of Flesh, published in 1961. It has no major characters, although there are, in Isbell and Dunning, two fine contenders. But these men aren't given the space to carry the story when Salter revisits the handful of men under their command in the 44th Fighter Squadron, stationed in Giebelstadt, West Germany, in the nineteen-fifties.

In writing about flying, Salter is amazing, just as he was in his memoir, Burning the Days, but in Cassada he's hampered by his attempts to marry an aristocratic and elegiac lyrical style to the terse thriller-like dialogue of the American pilots as they sit drinking in German bars or get into fights high up in the sky with the "crazy Canucks." He's better, really, at marrying the meteorological to the lyrical: "A wind was blowing, a German October wind, chilly, with points of moisture in it."

There are many other extraordinary passages, thoughts, and cameo portraits in Cassada. A plane taking off from the base airfield seems to be "fleeing from a roar that washes over the field like a furnace thrown open"; the wife of the squadron leader is described as "grey-eyed and unknowable though not shy", while Captain Isbell, admiring one of the younger pilots, states his creed: "Show me a man who knows how to lie, he thought, and I'll show you a smile of genuine beauty. I'll show you someone who knows how the world turns."

There are a number of startlingly clunky moments as well, surprising in a writer of Salter's superb gifts, along with occasional bits of nightclub dialogue that seem to have been lifted straight out of a B-movie, and because Cassada is, although condensed, so bent on veering towards the panoramic, it seems never to quite work as a whole, marvellous though several of its parts manage to be. Cassada, its hero--although "hero" is not quite the right word for a kind of Icarus whose hubris leads him to fall from the sky--is a character Salter doesn't give much time or attention to, his real affection being confined not only to Dunning and Isbell, but also to Lieutenant Godchaux, Dunning's favourite of the young pilots, who is eventually lured into an affair by Dunning's wife, Mayann.

Here's how Salter, that eternal romantic, ends their progression from mutual shyness to their taking a hotel room in the Porta Nigra for a few hours of love in the afternoon: "It was there, not only on that day but on a number thereafter, that Lancelot, aware of the danger, went with his queen."

Although there are quick but emotionally affecting portraits of a few of the air force wives (particularly of Isbell's wife Marian, and of Mayann) Cassada most concerns itself with the world of older men--men who've had punitive but superior educations at West Point--doling out praise or blame to younger men. It's a tense world of non-biological fathers and sons, a world of instructive teasing, harsh jokes, and competitive repartee.

If one compares Cassada to Light Years--all those sunlit and elegantly bohemian picnics on lawns and beaches--or even if one compares it to the only sporadically thrilling Burning the Days, it still falls short of the more stunning work, in spite of its many fine moments and insights.

But even if Cassada had no other fine qualities at all, it would still be worth reading for its uncanny ability to catch the fleetingness of life, best illustrated in its final words, blazing as they do with the warning that even writers can't go home again (even if these same words also, paradoxically, seem to speak of the writer's honourable madness in going back to try to do it all over again): "lt was all passing, for the first time as well as the last. His eyes devoured everything, but hardly made things out. He did not know what he was thinking. It all seemed a long struggle which he could not decide if he had won or lost. Parts of it he could hardly remember. The rest was still clear. But it was all back, falling behind. There was no use trying to save anything."

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.