Hockey Sur Glace: Stories [Paperback]

Peter LaSalle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1999

Literary short stories on the place of ice hockey in our lives and imaginations.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

There has been some terrific fiction written around sports, baseball first among all others. The drama of a game or a championship season lends itself to the telling of a great story. Peter LaSalle has deftly illustrated that hockey has as much to offer; his short stories evoke the crisp air and exhilaration of winter sport. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Ice hockey is the unifying element that ties together the seven stories and four poems in this poignantly written but thematically thin collection from LaSalle (Strange Sunlight; The Graves of Famous Writers). Most of the stories are set in New England, and hockey serves variously as metaphor, subject and narrative vehicle. "Hockey Angels," for instance, is a coming-of-age tale filtered through pickup games and early schoolboy competition, while "Wellesley College for Women, 1969" offers a more romantic meditation from a Harvard undergrad narrator. "Le Rocket Negre" deals with the rise and fall of a black star, a relative rarity in the sport, while "The Injury" takes an oblique stream-of-consciousness approach to hockey's unique dangers. The best yarn in the collection is "Additional Considerations," which posits the existence of a "sleep shot" that represents the narrator's desire to interject those critical statements and observations that often go unsaid in important relationships. It's refreshing to see a literary approach taken to a game that rarely receives much consideration in fiction. If much of the prose is far too mannered and elegiac, that's a common enough flaw in writing that uses a particular sport as a prism through which to view the passage of time. Readers familiar with baseball-inspired literature and its accompanying paeans to spring will be pleasantly jarred by the way LaSalle evokes winter as the trigger for intense memory and feeling.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Breakaway Books (January 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1891369008
• ISBN-13: 978-1891369001
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,290,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Affectionate, Elegant, Warm and Human Stories, April 27, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Hockey Sur Glace: Stories (Hardcover)

Ice hockey, perhaps the greatest and most demanding of sports (do you sense a bias?), rarely has been the subject of fiction. For this reason, if no other, Peter LaSalle's collection of stories, "Hockey Sur Glace", is remarkable in itself. But the seeming anomaly of the book's mere existence only draws the light more brightly on these deeply affectionate, elegantly written, warm and human stories about the way hockey indelibly marks the lives of those who play it, those who watch it, those who live their lives at the rink or on the icy ponds of long northern winters. "Hockey Sur Glace" is, to be sure, an uneven collection of stories (with a few short poems interspersed). The best of the lot are the first two, "Hockey Angels" and "Le Rocket Negre". But while the other stories are somewhat less than remarkable, all of them bear the mark of strong feeling for a sport which, perhaps more than any other, suffuses the lives of those who play it. If you play hockey, or have children who play hockey, or if you just like the sport, reading this slim collection of stories will be time well spent.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Almost Four Stars, but...., May 15, 2000

By 

James Carragher (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hockey Sur Glace: Stories (Paperback)

A book by and for north people, who grew up in cold winters, whose toes froze on the walk back from pond to home, and who built the small fires of kindling and scrap wood to stay warm as afternoon faded and the hockey game went on. I hadn't thought for years about the way we carried skates, even those of us who didn't play much, by their laces slung over the blade of the hockey stick, but Peter LaSalle gets that detail and so much else about the game and the era, late fifties to early seventies mostly, exactly right. The problem is the stories themselves are lightweight and entirely too similar in tone and substance. The first two -- Hockey Angels and Le Rocket Negre -- are the best of the book, closely followed by three poems, particularly A Pond-Hockey Pledge. So, overall, a slight read, but still, for those of us who come from this place and this era, there's a sweet feel of things gone by here, and it's nice to see hockey written about, and this book can be good consolation in late spring when your team has been unceremoniously booted from the Stanley Cup playoffs.

5.0 out of 5 stars Long live hockey fiction, March 3, 2000

By 

M. A. Liguori "Dan Li" (Lelystad, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hockey Sur Glace: Stories (Paperback)

It is really great to read about hockey and life and how hockey is intertwined with the lives of those of us who love the game.