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Book Reviewed by:An extraordinary literary event, a major new novel by the PEN/Faulkner winner and acclaimed master: a sweeping, seductive, deeply moving story set in the years after World War II.
From his experiences as a naval officer in battles off Okinawa during World War II, Philip Bowman returns to America and finds a position as a book editor. It was a time when publishing was still a private affair - a scattered family of small houses here and in Europe - a time of gatherings in fabled apartments, parties into the night. It is a world in which to immerse himself, a world of intimate connections and surprising triumphs. But the deal that Philip cannot seem to close is love: one marriage goes bad; another fails to happen; and, finally, he meets a woman who enthralls, then betrays him, setting him on a course he could never have imagined for himself.
Written with Salter's signature economy of prose, All That Is fiercely, fluidly explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change: a dazzling, sometimes devastating labyrinth of love and ambition, of the small shocks and grand pleasures of being alive.
Chapter 1
Break of Day
All night in darkness the water sped past.
In tier on tier of iron bunks below deck, silent, six deep, lay hundreds of men, many face-up with their eyes still open though it was near morning. The lights were dimmed, the engines throbbing endlessly, the ventilators pulling in damp air, fifteen hundred men with their packs and weapons heavy enough to take them straight to the bottom, like an anvil dropped in the sea, part of a vast army sailing towards Okinawa, the great island that was just to the south of Japan. In truth, Okinawa was Japan, part of the homeland, strange and unknown. The war that had been going on for three and a half years was in its final act. In half an hour the first groups of men would file in for breakfast, standing as they ate, shoulder to shoulder, solemn, unspeaking. The ship was moving smoothly with faint sound. The steel of the hull creaked.
The war in the Pacific was not like the rest of it. The ...
Despite its many merits though, the pillar on which this novel rests, Philip Bowman, remains a frustratingly opaque character. Protagonists don’t necessarily have to be good or bad for us to engage with them but they have to give us some reason to care. Bowman doesn’t. That we can still engage with the story regardless speaks volumes about Salter’s writing...continued
Full Review
(898 words)
(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
John Banville
Enthralling...A vividly imagined and beautifully written evocation of a postwar world. Julian Barnes
A consistently elegant and enjoyable novel, full of verve and wisdom.
In All That Is, just after World War II, one of Bowman's good friends is so captivated by the village of Piermont, New York that he buys a house close to the water and watches the Hudson river flow by from his home. The town, in New York's Rockland County, is picturesquely framed by the Hudson river on one side and the Tallman Mountain State Park on the other.
These days Piermont, which is just a few miles south of the Tappan Zee bridge (one of the main connectors between New York City and New Jersey), is a fashionable village attracting yuppie visitors and artists, but not so long ago it was quite a depressed town. It had a manufacturing base and was home to the Continental Can Company in the 50s and a paper company, which shuttered ...
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