Posts tagged footie

This book is very good and it’s a shame that it’s not available in the States. Although I guess that a book about the brief tenure of a beloved and eccentric football club manager at a rival club does not have a big demographic here. Still, as The Times (the British one, not the Gray Lady) said:

“Probably the best novel ever written about sport.”

Which I mostly quoted because I like how British people say sport instead of sports, but it’s a pretty fair estimation. Very very good book. It is rare to read a book focused on sports at all, let alone one that starts to pry at the bizarre complication of emotions involved in making them a livelihood. I accidentally read a great deal of it while drinking wine, which I think was the right way.

Even though I am pretty sure I did not understand half of it. It was confusing in that delightfully British way, where I just assumed I was confused because everything I didn’t understand was too old and civilized for my limited American comprehension. I suspect you are supposed to know who Brian Clough is when you start it, and I did not. I don’t think you need to like soccer to like this book, but I bet it helps.

(As a side not, it may interest you to know that, according to Wikipedia, Peace is a supporter of Huddersfield Town, a local rival of Leeds United, Leeds being the club that Clough briefly and disastrously managed. Hmmm!)

You can buy it from the London Review Bookshop here, and I hope you do. Or you can do what I did and pop down to Three Lives and buy it there. I have no idea how they got it, but that’s where I stumbled over it. It’s on the staff picks table.

After I finished it I realized that it is the same David Peace who wrote Tokyo Year Zero and Occupied City, which I also really loved, and if you like crime novels better than sports novels, might be the books for you. He has really mastered the first-person stream-of-consciousness thing like few other writers going.