Football E-Book

Jean-Philippe Toussaint

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Growing up in Belgium, Football was Jean-Philippe Touissant's life, a passion not shared by his bookish family. Now an acclaimed novelist, essayist, and filmmaker, he reflects upon his lifelong love for the game with an intellectual's keen mind and a sports fan's heart. What, he ponders, has a lifetime of Football fandom taught him about life and the passage of time itself. Football takes readers on an idiosyncratic journey that delves deep into the author's childhood memories, but also transports us to World Cup matches in Japan, Germany, South Africa, and Brazil. Along the way, it kicks around such provocative questions as: How does Football fandom both support and transcend nationalism? How are our memories of soccer matches both collective and distinctly personal? And how can a game this beautiful and this ephemeral be adequately captured in words? Part travelogue, part memoir, and part philosophical essay, Football is entirely unique, a thrilling departure from the usual clichés of sports writing. Even readers with little knowledge of the game will be enthralled by Touissant's profound musings and lyrical prose.

Leseprobe

‘For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last thirty years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? … Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint… Toussaint’s writing is remarkable for its conciseness, its elision.’ — Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island

‘Toussaint is carving out one of the most fascinating literary oeuvres of our times.’ — Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

‘That there is nothing like this being written in English at the moment should be recommendation enough to the curious reader.’ — Jonathan Gibbs, Independent

‘Toussaint’s prose is a pleasure to read: precise and increasingly muscular. There is a mesmerizing quality to his attention to detail… that marks him out as a successor to those other Minuit authors, the practitioners of the nouveau roman. But his is also a distinctive and original voice in French fiction.’ — Adrian Tahourdin, Times Literary Supplement

‘Toussaint has established himself as one of contemporary French literature’s most distinctive voices, turning the existential tradition into something lighter, warmer and ultimately more open.’ — Juliet Jacques, New Statesman

FOOTBALL

JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT

Followed by

ZIDANE’S MELANCHOLY

Translated by

SHAUN WHITESIDE

This is a book that no one will like, not intellectuals, who aren’t interested in football, or football-lovers, who will find it too intellectual. But I had to write it, I didn’t want to break the fine thread that still connects me to the world.

Contents

Title PageDedicationFootballAbout the AuthorCurrent and forthcoming books by Fitzcarraldo EditionsCopyright

1998

This story begins in 1998, with this date that suddenly strikes me as far away, sunk in the past, already buried heavily away in the finished twentieth century, which will seem to future generations as if it’s from another era. It’s an eminently strange number, this 1998, with this 1 and this 9 already looking so outmoded to our contemporary eyes, as if this date, 1998, though so close to us, though still so intimately connected to our lives, to our time, to our flesh and to our history, to our kisses and our sorrows, had accidentally sunk its teeth into the edge of the previous century and, inadvertently, found its feet dangling in the past. It’s not our fault, but we are compromised by this past which we would have preferred to avoid. We know instinctively that the past, when we discover it in old photographs or archive pictures, always has a slightly awkward aspect to it, stiff, touching, even laughable, while the present – which is in fact merely its exact anticipation – is by contrast serious, reliable and worthy of respect. But it is in 1998 that this story begins, Jean, my son, was nine years old, Anna, my daughter, four. It was in 1998, very precisely on 10 June 1998 that, for the first time in my life, I went to a stadium to see a World Cup football match. The dates of the World Cups that followed – 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014 – are dates that might be called synonyms for 1998, but they are by no means homonyms, because they escape the withering of those strange and antiquated numbers, the 1 and 9 that mark them with a red light, like the lily on the shoulder of Milady de Winter, and inscribe them irrevocably in the past. Yes, 1998 is an old-fashioned date, a date that has aged badly, a date that had almost ‘expired in its own lifetime’, to repeat an expression I used in one of my novels, a date ‘patinated by time, as if from the outset it bore within itself, like a corrosive poison hidden inside, the seed of its own dissolution, its definitive disappearance in the vast rush of time’.

Wonder

Football, like painting according to Leonardo da Vinci, is a cosa mentale; it is in the imagination that it is measured and appreciated. The nature of the wonder that football provokes derives from the fantasies of triumph and omnipotence that it generates in our minds. With my eyes closed, whatever my age and my physical condition, I am the star striker who scores the winning goal or the goalkeeper who throws himself in slow motion into the ether to make a crucial save. As a child I scored stunning goals (in my mind’s eye, admittedly). The arms that I then raised to the sky in my parents’ deserted sitting-room were as much a part of the ritual and the celebration as the goal that I had just scored. It was the celebrations, the congratulations, the kneeling on the pitch, the team mates throwing themselves on me and surrounding me, hugging me, showering me with praise, that I savoured most, not the move itself, it was my narcissistic triumph that brought me delight, not at all the possibility that it might one day happen in reality, that I might one day be able to control the ball marvellously well with my foot so that, with composure, with mastery, with skill, in a real stadium, facing real opponents, on a real pitch, I might propel it with a very pure twenty-five metre strike into the top corner of the opposing team’s goal, in spite of the hopelessly floundering goalkeeper’s desperate attempt to parry. The image is seductive, certainly, but I have other ambitions in life than being skilful with my feet. In my case it’s more my hand, not only in art. Reality is almost always disappointing, that won’t have escaped you. At the age of thirteen it was over, my footballing career was at an end. My last dreams of glory date from the spring of 1970, it was in Brussels, in the flat on rue Jules-Lejeune. My parents had just informed me that we were going to move to Paris, and I looked sadly at the door frame that separated the dining room from the sitting room and which acted as my imaginary goal, the setting for my last scenarios of footballing glory. An era was coming to an end. Reality for me now was this unknown future in Paris, the start of school in 1970 when I would join the fourth year as a boarder at a secondary school in Maisons-Laffitte. It would be a deracination, it would be the end of childhood, of happy days and of Brussels. My finest years would be over. Childhood is always followed by adolescence, and life, in reality, is uncompromising, the ball, while round, is recalcitrant and capricious, it resists us, thwarts us, humiliates us.