This Love Is Not for Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juarez
By Robery Andrew Powell.
Before the publication of Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s autobiographical account of being a football supporter, “the beautiful game” was not considered a subject for serious writing. Football books were either ghosted biographies of stars and managers, or celebrations of particular clubs. Since Hornby, a genre of books about football has emerged, often dealing with the individual experience of supporters but often branching out to explore the social and cultural contexts that surround the world’s favourite game (My Father and other Working Class Football Heroes by Gary Imlach or Football Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper, for example.) Powell’s book is unusual as it is written by an American for whom football (or soccer) is not a religion given at birth, but a game played by and followed by foreigners – in his case, the peoples of drug scarred Jaurez in Mexico, where Powell has put down roots. In the USA, soccer is a minority sport and usually associated with girls, despite the numerous attempts over the years to export it to a national level. The fact Powell can stand at a distance from the sport is a definite advantage, giving his the detachment of an anthropologist. He follows the fortune – and mainly the misfortunes – of Los Indios, a team that inspires great loyalty but minimal joy. This book is about far more than soccer, however, it is an account of a community where murder is common, drug addiction the norm and law and order something that departed as the cartels moved in. Like supporting a losing team, survival depends on hope, determination, loyalty and belief, only unlike football, this really is a question of life and death.
THE LOST COSMONAUT
by Daniel Kalder
This remains my favourite travel book, ever. I should perhaps qualify that statement by saying I am not a great fan of the genre, for reasons I cannot really explain although I think it is connected to my own feelings about the reliability of personal accounts – they are a bit too close to journalism; I suspect there is still a free meal for the author in there somewhere. Kalder’s choices of places to visit could not possibly involve a free meal, and if they did, you suspect it would be better to starve. Kalder is an “anti-tourist” but that does not mean he is against tourism. To clarify this it is probably best to quote the Anti-Tourist Manifesto
(Excerpts from the resolutions passed at the first international congress of Anti- Tourists at the Shymkent Hotel, Shymkent, Kazakhstan, October 1999)
The anti-tourist eschews comfort.
The anti-tourist embraces hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels.
The anti-tourist seeks locked doors and demolished buildings.
The anti-tourist travels at the wrong time of year.
The anti-tourist prefers dead things to living ones.
The anti-tourist is humble and seeks invisibility.
The anti-tourist is interested only in hidden histories, in delightful obscurities, in bad art.
The anti-tourist believes beauty is in the street.
The anti-tourist holds that whatever travel does, it rarely broadens the mind.
The anti-tourist values disorientation over enlightenment.
The anti-tourist loves truth, but he is also partial to lies. Especially his own.
Thus Kalder sets off on trips to the unvisited, unattractive and unappealing forgotten former Soviet republics and frequently discovers locations that fit the specifications of the manifesto. The narrative is low-key and understated, humorously evocative. The journeys are undertaken in all seriousness but puzzle even the locals – at one point a ticket inspect on the way to a chosen city simply refuses to believe the travellers are going there by their own choice, she cannot accept they are tourists. In one hotel, Kalder delights in the old radios the rooms are fitted with – radios you cannot turn off or tune but which emit a constant, low-pitched humming sound. I think The Lost Cosmonaut is a reminder of the fact that we do not know our world – we have the illusion – through modern communications, mapping and the collation of data – that it is all known and familiar. It is good to be reminded that this is not the case, and reflect that we can probably see this for ourselves without going nearly as far afield as Shymkent.
THEN
by Julie Myerson
I feel uneasy with books that create the worst possible, most desperate situations and then imagine the appalling ways people in those situations might behave. THEN is a book of this kind, written by someone who has achieved a certain notoriety recently for having converted her teenage son’s drug addiction into material for a book. I haven’t looked into this in much detail because, frankly, I’m not interested and I suspect this blending of what is written and the context around it would only confuse and interfere with one’s reading of THEN. The novel is, stylistically, a great achievement – a narrative that blurs the characters awareness of fantasy and reality, something which becomes more disturbing as the story evolves. There is a spare, icy quality to the prose – evocative of the frozen, post-apocalyptic world that is the setting of the novel. The rendering of atmosphere and suffering is skillful – but there hangs my reservations. There seems to me something too easy about a text where despair and suffering are so extreme that the reader is only able to be a voyeur. We are not in a position to engage at any ethical level, the decisions taken and the behaviour of the main character are a product of such violence that we can only really feel dismay. I question the value of this experience as something reached through reading. Moreover, I suspect it is dangerous – one of the greatest illusions we can harbour is that being able to experience emotion when reading is the equivalent of knowing feelings in real life. Perhaps there are certain dark journeys of the soul that cannot be the stuff of fiction, which is to say they should not be neatly packaged for an audience. I think THEN is such a novel.
RIDDLEY WALKER
by Russell Hoban
Dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction has almost become a specific genre of fiction, producing a number of exceptional book in recent years – The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace, and The Book of Dave by Will Self are two impressive examples. The latter is not alone in recognizing its debt to a lesser known novel published in 1980 by Russell Hoban entitled Riddley Walker. As summarized in Wikipedia, the book
"...is set about two thousand years after a nuclear war has devastated world civilizations. The main action of the story begins when the young narrator, Riddley, stumbles upon efforts to recreate a weapon of the ancient world. The novel's characters live a harsh life in a small area which is presently the English county of Kent, and know nothing of the world outside of "Inland" (England). Their level of civilization is similar to
Apart from the interest of the story, the most engaging aspect of the book is Hoban’s creation of a debased, “non-standard” English which has replaced the standard English with which we are familiar. Thus the very language of the text reflects the distance in time and of civilization the world of the novel explores. The geographical setting happens to be the area of Kent where I grew up and the wit and inventiveness of Hoban’s language is evident the changes of place names – Monk’s Horton becomes “Monkey’s Whoar Town,” The River Stour becomes the “Sour,” and Wye becomes “How.” A few years ago, when presenting her new novel Pigtopia at a British Council event in
A TOUCH OF LOVE
by Jonathan Coe
I should begin by saying that I am a great fan of Jonathan Coe and am fascinated by the way his evolution as a writer. Traditionally, writers whose style changes significantly as they get older, tend to move from a more to less traditional format as they experiment and push the boundaries of narrative and fiction. Recently, this seems to be reversed in the work of David Mitchell or Jonathan Franzen and is certainly the case with Jonathan Coe. Perhaps this is a post-modernist phenomenon – what looks like experimentation is actually the dominant aesthetic and is thus a natural choice for narrative. Returning to a classical format of an all-seeing narrator and characters whose lives and action can be presented to us in authoritative detail has become the radical departure. Coe’s more recent writing reflects this change – his earlier work contains several inventive and original explorations of narrative, the more recent work, using a less inventive structure, is probably more satisfying. Yet I have a great affection for the early work. For this reason, the book I would recommend is A Touch of Love. The tragic-comic tone, the satirical evocation of failed academic ambition and the terrible sense of loss that seems to haunt much of Coe’s writing combine in a truly skillful narrative. It is made more effective by the introduction of a series of short stories written by the main protagonist, Robin, which have the effect of both illuminating and clouding our understanding of their author. The change of style and the way we become engaged by these fictions within fictions are central to the novel. I’ve commented on how the narrative form has changed in Coe’s writing but what have not changed are his concerns – the decisions and moments that define our lives, the social and political pressures that impinge on our ability to realize ourselves, the nature of love and loss. You will find these in A Touch of Love as well as in his most recent work.
A FIRST-CLASS MADNESS
by Hassir Ghaemi
It seems one of the problems shared by President Obama, Tony Blair and George Bush might be that they are, well, sane – normal, at least according to this new book by Nassir Ghaemi. The question of which characteristics or qualities make leaders is a fascinating one, especially when it touches on the theme of mental health. Whereas it is easy and something of a relief to determine that Hitler, Amin or Pol Pot were mad (if theirs were the actions of sane people what does that say about human kind?) it is a little discomforting to think that great leaders such as Churchill, Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Ghandi could also have been on the books of history’s psychiatrists, or that their pathologies might have been central to their success. In this respect, the topic is as much about the cultural perception of mental illness as its relation to power and leadership and Ghaemi has made a valuable contribution to both questions in this book
SLEEPER WAKES
by Alistair Morgan
The blurb on the back of Sleeper’s Wake reads “In the aftermath of the car crash that killed his wife and daughter, John Wraith travels to a remote resort on the South African coast. There he meets Jackie, a disturbed young woman of seventeen, and is immediately and dangerously drawn to her.” The word “wraith” means “ghost” or “spirit” and for someone who has recently lost his family, John is a kind of walking ghost, shocked and puzzled, detached from the processes of everyday life. Yet for all our sympathy, there is something odd and unappealing about the protagonist. Morgan draws a very fine line between suggestion and definition, the effect of which is to create a ghost-like narrator whose comments and subsequent behaviour do not add up. Wraith’s journey to the South African coast takes us to a landscape uncomfortably mixing human civilization and the forces of nature and it is here that John re-engages with life, though in doing so further ambiguities and dangers are revealed. Perhaps the excellent parts of the book – the style, atmosphere, characters – do not quite add up to a satisfying whole; personally I felt a little disappointed and wondered whether it would have been better as a long short story, but it is an interesting read by a new talent.
THE ROBBER BRIDE
by Margaret Atwood
I’ve read several Atwood novels this year (thanks Belen!) and each one seems to find a different but equally impressive range of ideas, characters and settings. The Robber Bride is a radical re-working of a fairly standard format. A number of protagonists (three women) are linked through shared suffering – in this case the impact on their lives of a seemingly classical femme fetal, and their separate narratives unfold at the same time as they interconnect and reflect. Finally, the narrative is brought back to the present (where it began) for the powerful ending. The plot and stories are brilliant but it is Atwood’s genius that makes them secondary to the psychological and social insights she provides into how different people respond to life’s challenges. Men, not unsurprisingly, do not emerge too favourably in this novel. Mostly they are vain, weak, lazy, predatory or just plain repulsive. It is even more interesting, therefore, that the person who brings the three women together is another woman, the femme fetal – Zenia. It’s a great book, shocking and provocative, with the capacity to take the reader into mysterious, uncomfortable areas of experience. If you read it, please let me know your impressions!
SWEET THAMES
by Matthew Kneale
London has been the inspiration for so many novels, and sometimes it seems to me that English writers want to produce a "London book" at some time in the lives, William Boyd's ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS being a recent example. Peter Ackroyd's LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY, apart from being a wonderful overview of the city's life and times, suggests many areas and periods where the novelist could locate a narrative. SWEET THAMES is set in one such period, 1849 and a deadly cholera epidemic. By combining strong charcaters and the historical backdrop of ignorance about disease and new thinking about civic engineering, Kneale produces a story of immense appeal and interest. My only warning for 2nd language readers is that the style and vocabulary is fairly challenging.
DIRT MUSIC
by Tim Winton
When I began choosing books for the Book Club in Madrid I was worried that I might end up just selecting books I like. Several years on, that is probably the case, inasmuch as I never chose a book I dislike. What I try and do, however, is read books chosen more or less at random, as a way of broadening my own process of selection. One such choice, bought “sight unseen” was Tim Winton’s DIRT MUSIC. It’s a book of immense lyricism, a sense of place so powerful you can small the earth and brine, and a group of characters who, though disturbing and sometimes shocking, are entirely believable. After reading DIRT MUSIC I ordered several other books by Winton. They were all good – interesting – but not one of them, in my opinion, comes close to the power of DIRT MUSIC. As for the plot, allow me to quote from the blurb: “Set in the wild landscape of Western Australia, this is a novel about the odds of breaking with the past, a love story about people stifled by grief and regret, whose dreams are lost, whose hope have dried up.” It is also about the moments of wordless music that rise from the dust and give us hope.
THERE’S A RIOT GOING ON
Peter Doggett
Non-fiction (2007)
Revolutionaries, rock stars, 60’s counter-culture, black power, Vietnam…If you are interested in any of the former, this book will prove to be gripping and informative. Doggett’s style is lively and entirely readable. By linking social issues to rock music he effectively provides a soundtrack for the narrative, but a soundtrack which looks in detail at the way musical traditions were adapted and shaped by the events they reflected, or sometimes inspired. The book is full of fascinating detail, carefully balanced to represent the various political and revolutionary movements of the 60’s and early 70’s.
