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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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