Though the correspondence is mostly about soccer, it is also about so much more.
An epistolary exploration of soccer and life.
In 2014, the highly regarded Scandinavian writers Knausgaard (My Struggle: Book Five, 2016, etc.) and Ekelund exchanged letters during the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. This book is the result of their exchanges. (It seems clear that they planned to produce a book based on their correspondence). Ekelund was in Brazil, an almost home-away-from-home for him, while Knausgaard was home, mostly in his adopted Sweden. Both are acclaimed writers in their own region, with growing reputations internationally, especially Knausgaard and his bestselling autobiographical My Struggle novels. Both love soccer, and thus the sport and especially the World Cup provide the connecting line for these insightful and discursive letters that reflect not only on o jogo bonito but also on seemingly everything else under the sun. From gender politics to family, food to writing, love and loss, tragedy and triumph, thoughts of suicide and feelings of ecstasy, and from the mundane aspects of daily life to the things that make life worth living (sometimes these are one and the same), the authors cover vast swaths of the human experience while always returning to their differing perspectives on the soccer they witnessed in 2014. For readers willing to accept these letters on their own terms and go with the sometimes stream-of-consciousness ramblings of two men deeply committed to the writer’s art, the rewards are great. However, there may not be enough soccer for fans expecting a work focusing on the sport, and what strikes some readers as joyful perambulations with two thoughtful interlocutors may strike others as self-indulgent and meandering. But for those for whom these letters resonate, the effect is powerful and cascading, a pleasing waterfall of imagery and intellect.
Though the correspondence is mostly about soccer, it is also about so much more.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-27983-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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