Blog

Roundtable

• Brendan Carney Byrne

  Editors’ Picks: Literary Soccer

  Tags:

  editors' picks,

  England,

  football,

  letters,

  literary criticism,

  soccer,

  World Cup

  Tweet

  Instead of another round-up of books on soccer-as-great-global-equalizer, the editors of LQ would like to present a quieter selection of our favorite literary soccer novels and memoirs. As Alexander Hemon writes in his blog about the Cup, questioning the American passion for soccer: "I don't know the numbers, but I would venture to guess that the number of Americans reading literary fiction is in the neighborhood of the number of Americans interested in soccer."

  Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Eduardo Galeano
  This compact, helter-skelter, highly poetic and personal mediation on soccer by LQ (and Obama) favorite Eduardo Galeano contains vital information about the sport, including ancient materials for soccer balls (ox bladders, and later horsehair), and amusing theological extrapolations, such as, “…there is no doubt that while Jesus lay dying on the cross the Romans were playing something similar to soccer.” Galeano delights in the sport’s anarchic beginnings and decries the commercialization of recent years.

  
  Envy, Yuri Olesha
  Olesha’s 1927 novella satirizes the New Soviet Man and his masterful athletic accomplishments from its opening line (“He sings in the mornings in the toilet.”), while clearly siding with the degenerate, unathletic, freeloaders whom the Leninist tide of history is sure to soon sweep away. The mockery, and its attendant jealousy, are on full display in a long passage detailing a soccer game between Germany and the USSR. The New York Review of Books blog contains an excerpt, as well as a slightly different reading.

  
  Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby
  This early Nick Hornby memoir charts his consuming, life-derailing obsession with football team Arsenal during its time as one of, if not the worst, UK clubs. Hornby chronicles, honestly and often painfully, how soccer allows an otherwise impossible, though still terse, connection between him and his father, as well as how love for the game is more the province of an obsessive than a fan. Since the 70s and 80s, Arsenal has gone on become one of the premier English football teams, making the memoir’s all-pervading sense of doom (something like a what White Sox fan might feel) more than a little ironic.

  
  Among the Thugs, Bill Buford
  In 1982, Buford, an editor at Granta and a relatively soccer-ignorant American, witnessed a mass of English football supporters invade a train and leave behind them a wake of destruction. Fascinated and repulsed, Buford decided get as close the phenomenon as humanly possible. The result is a fierce book with plenty of indelible moments, including an impossible to expunge riot through an Italian city’s streets that resembles a World War II invasion than anything else. Most disturbing is evidence that the men committing these atrocious acts are, in their other, predominant lives, relatively well-behaved husbands and co-workers with no outward signs of violent psychosis. For more on English football hooliganism, see Alan Clarke’s 1989 TV-film The Firm, featuring a very young, very enraged Gary Oldman.

  
  The Damned Utd, David Peace
  Described by author David Peace as “an occult history of Leeds United,” this novel concerns the real, disastrous 44 day-residency of Brian Clough at the English club. Clough to this day is widely regarded to be one of the finest managers in the history of English professional soccer but had, to say the least, a difficult personality. Peace writes in the same torturous, driving style as in his better-known crime novels, one of which a reviewer described thusly: “What a thriller by Gertrude Stein would be like.” Several law suits have sprung up claiming that Peace’s novel describes events that did not actually happen. The book was turned into a film last year, starring the omnipresent Michael Sheen.

  
  Nazi Literature in the Americas,
  Roberto Bolaño
  This early Roberto Bolaño novel takes the form of an encyclopedia of infamous (and imaginary) National Socialist authors, and features as its twenty-ninth entry, “Argentino Schiaffino, alias Fatso,” a good-humored and strangely sympathetic Argentinean poet, playwright, and novelist who is utterly obsessed with soccer. He leands feared Boca soccer gang and composes a play in which “heads of state and diplomats from various Latin American nations meet…to discuss options for restoring the natural and traditional supremacy of Latin American soccer, which is under threat from the European total-football approach.” He later publicly abandons his love of the sport, becoming a kind of phantom glimpsed by Argentineans at various World Cups.

  July 1, 2010
  • Email /
  • Print /
  • Comment now