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""Solo Faces" contrasts a devotion to mountain climbing with the earthbound tugs of love and ordinary life . . . A beautifully composed book that will remind readers of Camus and Saint-Exupery. It exemplifies the purity it describes."--Michael Dirda, "The Washington Post"
"[Salter is in] the great modern tradition of Conrad and Hemingway and Malraux."--Samuel Hynes, "The New York Times Book Review"
"""A terrific novel--compelling, sad, wise, and kindhearted. Mr. Salter's prose is rare and stunning . . . How energizing it is to read a novel with a real hero in it--and a real hero he is.--John Irving
"[Salter is in] the great modern tradition of Conrad and Hemingway and Malraux."--Samuel Hynes, "The New York Times Book Review"
"""A terrific novel--compelling, sad, wise, and kindhearted. Mr. Salter's prose is rare and stunning . . . How energizing it is to read a novel with a real hero in it--and a real hero he is.--John Irving
Product Description
Rand lives free; lean, pure and defiant, the world has little influence on him. His passion is climbing – the mountains, the huge vertical faces. There, where storms, snow, or rockfall can kill, he finds his happiness, sometimes climbing with others, sometimes alone. This is a novel of obsession and where it leads. Rand, not intending it, becomes suddenly famous for a daring rescue in the Alps. What happens when passion is spent and what becomes of heroes is revealed in this terse and powerfully written novel.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
What makes SOLO FACES such a good read is, in part, 1) Salter's lean, understated, "honest" style, 2) his concern for all his characters, and 3) his ability to write about climbing intelligently without overdoing it. As far as I know, no novelist but Salter has pulled #3 off successfully. The novel is based (more or less) on the life of Gary Hemming (Rand in the book), who made a heroic rescue of two German climbers (Italians in the book) who were stranded on the daunting face of the Dru. Rand is a believable character: humble and shy, but confident and unable (or unwilling) to develop attachments to the various women that shuffle in and out of his life. I did not love the book's final chapter, which seems too obscure and unsatisfying. But maybe I just didn't get it. All in all, this is a very fine novel by one of our most underread writers.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The saga of a man who feels restrained by conventions and flat ground. Unable to find peace in the heights of his job as a roofer of churches he travels to southern France to assault the Alps. Climbing alone he negotiates the granite faces of the mountains until he takes on their majestic qualities himself. When a friend is trapped on the mountain, he makes a daring one man rescue during a storm that brings him the notice he has always shunned. But glory is fleeting and he returns to the anonymity he prefers having satisfied the only person of importance in his life, himself. This superbly written prose includes a description of being struck by lightning that is so vivid that you feel it. Salter is without question one of America's great writers and this is one of his best.
5 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Solo Faces is, like all other Salter works, almost
adolescent in its insistence--on such well-worn
trappings as romantic isolation, the heroic challenge of physical exertion, the honor of straight male comradship--and yet, despite the reliance on such usually hoary old saw-horse thematics, the book is compelling--
because felt: The mountain scenes seem achingly vivid, the fatigue, the exhilaration and ebb of yearning as abrupt and immediate as
stone, ice and sunburn to the nervous-system.
This is the most integral and "packed" of Salter's novels; perhaps a certain objective distance put the material into manageable perspective, even the dialogue seeming to mirror the "short-hand" of thought itself.
What we get in a Salter novel is an idealized
effigy or sculpture of an imagined arc of
a single man's effort--perhaps throwing a discus, or reaching for a cloud--that could not be compromised with the horizontal medium
of mere narrative, but required handfuls of
glinting crystals, presented almost at random,
without the necessity of chronology or verisimilitude, but true to our deeper, more
"lovely" natures, as wild, half-tamed creatures, longing for the wind and the chase,
the dare and the violation of harsh experience.
adolescent in its insistence--on such well-worn
trappings as romantic isolation, the heroic challenge of physical exertion, the honor of straight male comradship--and yet, despite the reliance on such usually hoary old saw-horse thematics, the book is compelling--
because felt: The mountain scenes seem achingly vivid, the fatigue, the exhilaration and ebb of yearning as abrupt and immediate as
stone, ice and sunburn to the nervous-system.
This is the most integral and "packed" of Salter's novels; perhaps a certain objective distance put the material into manageable perspective, even the dialogue seeming to mirror the "short-hand" of thought itself.
What we get in a Salter novel is an idealized
effigy or sculpture of an imagined arc of
a single man's effort--perhaps throwing a discus, or reaching for a cloud--that could not be compromised with the horizontal medium
of mere narrative, but required handfuls of
glinting crystals, presented almost at random,
without the necessity of chronology or verisimilitude, but true to our deeper, more
"lovely" natures, as wild, half-tamed creatures, longing for the wind and the chase,
the dare and the violation of harsh experience.
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