Football by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
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.‘Toussaint is carving out one of the most fascinating literary oeuvres of our times’
— Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
‘For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? … Toussaint’s writing is remarkable for its conciseness, its elision. All his books are short, and the shortest of all is La Mélancholie de Zidane, a ten-page essay which Minuit, charmingly but quite properly, published in 2006 as a stand-alone book. Zidane is perhaps the closest Toussaint comes to meta-fiction: in it, he not only revisits all his motifs, but does so with explicit references, dropped in via footnotes, to The Bathroom, Bachelard and Freud.’
— Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island
‘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
‘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 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
Jean-Philippe Toussaint is the author of nine novels, all published by Éditions de Minuit in France, and the winner of numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis for Running Away and the Prix Décembre for The Truth about Marie.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781910695173 |
| ISBN 10 | 1910695173 |
| Title | Football |
| Author | Jean-Philippe Toussaint |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Fitzcarraldo Editions |
| Year published | 2016-05-11 |
| Number of pages | 88 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |