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WORK TITLE: Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game
WORK NOTES: with Karl Ove Knausgaard
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 11/20/1953
WEBSITE: http://www.fredrikekelund.se/enlish/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Swedish
https://us.macmillan.com/author/fredrikekelund * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/06/home-and-away-karl-ove-knausgaard-fredrik-ekelund-digested-read * https://www.ft.com/content/494f17ea-c071-11e6-81c2-f57d90f6741a
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1953, Uppsala, Sweden.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, poet, playwright, translator, and documentary filmmaker.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Fredrik Ekelund is a prolific writer who, since 1984, has published novels, detective novels, poetry, and books about soccer. Edkelund, who is Swedish, is also a playwright, has worked on documentary films, and is a translator of Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Ekelund is coauthor with Norwegian writer and autobiographical novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard of Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game. The book provides the authors a venue to discuss soccer and the World Cup in Brazil and ultimately reflect on life and death, politics, art and literature, and class distinctions.
Home and Away features an exchange of letters between the two creative writer, who met each other at a casual soccer game. Brazil is in one of Ekelund’s favorite places, and he is in Brazil for the 2014 FIFA World Cup of soccer. Knausgaard is at his home in Sweden watching the games on television while he takes care of his kids and promotes his books. Surprisingly, Ekelund also watches the majority of games on television, attending only one game in person. The other games he watches in public places, such as bars and cafés where soccer fans gather with intense interest in the games’ outcomes.
The exchange of e-mails between the writers reveal their love of the game of soccer. They “debate the merits of teams and tactics, agonize over goals scored or missed opportunities,” noted Globe and Mail Online contributor John Doyle, adding: “Both are soccer fanatics with encyclopedic knowledge of previous World Cup tournaments.” Ekelund, like most of the Brazilians around him, expects Brazil to make it to the final game and ultimately win the championship. However, the 2014 World Cup takes many unexpected turns.
Ekelund primary writes about the experience of being in Brazil as he hangs out with his Brazilian friends. Knausgaard, however, guides their conversations to their feelings about modern life and what it means to be a citizen in a globalized world economy. “The meat of material about soccer as a way of understanding the human spirit and the twists of history comes from Knausgaard,” noted Globe and Mail Online contributor John Doyle. The two authors’ different views about both soccer and life come to the surface. In terms of soccer, Ekelund prefers a wide open game and admires the game’s ebb and flow while Knausgård prefers a more tactical game that features the game’s physicality.
As for the Brazilians’ hopes of winning a championship in their home county, their dreams are dashed when the Germans handily defeat Brazil by a humiliating score of 7-1. “Mr Ekelund’s portrait of Rio after the match is haunting,” wrote a contributor to the Economist. Ekelund reports on the city’s depressive atmosphere following the defeat, with restaurants largely empty, and the devastation that both Ekelund and his Brazilian friends are experiencing. Knausgaard, however, was never a big fan of Brazil and the Brazilian style of soccer. “The swaggering, self-destructive style of its play only made him long for the guile of Italy or Argentina,” noted Globe and Mail Online contributor Doyle. Nevertheless, both writers share their dislike for Germany eventually winning the championship.
San Francisco Chronicle Online contributor Colin Fleming noted that he preferred the letters from Ekelund,writing: “As a general rule, it’s a relief when you turn a page and find an Ekelund missive waiting for you. He’s more conversational, with a better understanding of soccer.” For a contributor to the Economist, the letters in Home and Away became more interesting as the book went on. The Economist contributor noted: “The trick is to let the writing wash over you, rather than fighting it,” adding that, “as the final nears … both authors get into their stride.”Publishers Weekly contributor Seth Satterlee remarked: “As the book progresses, readers can see Knausgaard and Ekelund learning from each other, realizing new desires and prejudices, reevaluating former positions, repositioning themselves.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Economist, November 5, 2016, “A Game of Two Halves; Football Writing,” review of Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game, p. 74(US).
Publishers Weekly, December 5, 2016, Seth Satterlee, review of Home and Away, p. 60.
ONLINE
Fredrik Ekelund Web site, http://www.fredrikekelund.se/enlish (August 31, 2017).
Globe and Mail Online, https://www.theglobeandmail.com (May 05, 2017 ), John Doyle, review of Home and Away.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (November 6, 2016), John J. Crace, “Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund – Digested Read.”
San Francisco Chronicle Online, http://www.sfgate.com (June 28, 2017 ), Colin Fleming, review of Home and Away.
Hi, and welcome to my website! Here you’ll find most of what there is to know about my writing activities, as well as some other stuff. I was born in Uppsala 1953 and arrived in Malmö in 1963. Except for a few stays abroad I have pretty much lived here ever since. I made my debut as an author in 1984 with the release of Stuv Malmö, kom!, a novel about dockworkers in the harbour of Malmö. Since then I have written an additional sixteen books (regular fiction, crime novels, poetry collections and three books about football). I also write drama, have made two films (with the documentary filmmaker Lasse Westman), and work as a translator (from Danish, Spanish, Portuguese and French). The easiest way to contact me is by sending an e-mail to: freddan53@gmail.com I always respond.
My literary production is as follows:
1984, ”Stuv Malmö, kom!” (novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
1990, ”Fotbollskarnevalen” (a book about the World Cup in Italy 1990, together with Ulf Peter Hallberg, Östlings Bokförlag Symposion)
1991, ”Självgeografi” (poems, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
1993, ”Taxi sju-två bland drömmare och dårar” (novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
1995, ”LIVS öppet” (poems, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
1996, ”Jag vill ha hela världen!” (novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
1999, ”Nina och sundet” (crime novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
2001, ”Torget” (163 short short stories, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
2002, ”Sambafotboll” (a book about brazilian football history, Ordfront)
2003, ”Pojken i eken” (crime novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
2004, ”Blueberry Hill” (crime novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
2005, ”Casal Ventoso” (crime novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
2008, ”m/s Tiden” (novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
2010, ”Fadevår, tack för ljuset!” (autobiographical novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
2012, ”Joggarna” (crime novel, Booklunds förlag)
2013, ”Som om vi aldrig hade gått här” (autobiographical novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag)
2014, ”Hemma-Borta” (a correspondence with Karl Ove Knausgård, Arx förlag in Sweden, Pelikanen in Norway)
Here two short texts from my book Sambafotboll from 2002, a book about the history of brazilian football. The two texts are from a chapter called: Kortpassningar (Short passes).
1.
There are many great figures to be found within Brazilian football. One of the greatest is Heleno de Freitas, the elegant player and scoring king who achieved huge success while playing for Botafogo during the 1940s. He was very good-looking, had a fiery temperament and was a big idol, not only with the men but also among the women of Copacabana. But the only true friend he seems to have had – was the ball. As for the rest, he was at war with the entire football world. Helena de Freitas best year was 1945 when returned from the South American Championship in Chile, voted as South America’s best center. Technically and physically, de Freitas had just about everything as a football player. The problem was his temperament. He became disliked by everyone, he spat on opponents, referees, and even came to be disliked by his own team-mates After a time, when the public discovered how easy it was to get him off balance, it was used against him. Among other things, they would scream, “Gilda! Gilda!” at him. In the popular film starring Rita Hayworth, “Gilda’s” hair was reminiscent of de Freitas’ and when he heard this name shouted he became enraged and was often ordered off the field after having committed some nasty tackle or verbal attack against an opposing player – or his team-mates, all as a response to the public’s provocations. Another way to greet the public’s provocations was to make goals in the heat of anger and these “gols de raiva” (goals of anger), contributed to his fame.
His career was tracked by scandals and game expulsions. He left Botafogo for the Boca Juniors in Argentina where within a short time he succeeded in making himself unpopular with both his team-mates and the management. The next station in his career was Columbia and the club, Millionários. There he became as big an idol as in his homeland, and a statue was even erected in his honour. But suddenly one day, he left Millionários and flew back to Rio. In Rio, he took the road that led directly to his old club, Botafogo, where he sat and watched the training. Something had permanently broken down inside him and there was never a new contract with Botafogo. Instead, he was often seen on a motorcycle, riding back and forth along the Copacabana where he had once been discovered, and all the more often he was seen sitting alone in the grandstand when Botafogo was training, crying, with a towel around his head. Psychiatric difficulties, brought on by syphilis, finally forced his family place him in a mental hospital. Inside its confines he organized football matches between the patients. He held onto everything and in his own room he passed the time by looking in albums with pictures of – “Heleno de Freitas, South America’s best center!”
They say that when he slept, he always did so with a ball cradled in his arms. It was there he died of a heart attack, 39 years old, in November 1959.
2.
The concept ”magic realism” was introduced by Carmen Balcells, Director of Publishing for Seix Barrels, the Spanish publishing company that during 60s and 70s marketed the books of many prominent Latin American authors. Coined solely as a commercial slogan, it was taken over by critics and the literary cognoscente, despite the fact that many of the authors included under this concept perhaps had more in common with the hardboiled realism of, for example, Hemingway and Vargas Llosa. The concept sought to place a finger on the fantastic; on how truth and lies are woven together to become wonderful works of art, and Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Loneliness came to represent the prototype for “magic realism.” An event in the history of Brazilian football that could easily find a place in a Márquez novel happened during the São Paulo championship of 1949 in a match between Santos and a lesser known team, XV de Piracicaba, from the local area. Santos, which was a very good team at the time, even though Pelé had yet to make his breakthrough, led 2-1 with only five minutes left in the match. The rain and wind were blowing hard when Piracicaba’s right-wing, José Cervi Junior, called “O Russo” (The Blonde), walked out towards the corner flag to kick the corner. He had made up his mind that this corner, one way or another, would lead to a tie and when he kicked it, the entire Piracicaba team stood within the Santos’ penalty area. Cervi, himself, on kicking the corner, ran towards the same penalty area at full speed. The ball, meanwhile, had gotten caught-up in the wind and stayed there before dropping back down – to José Cervi coming at full speed. With a perfect nick, he tied the match on his own corner! And the referee, the Englishman, Percy Snape, saw no reason not to confirm the goal, whereupon the match, much to the wild joy of the Piracicaba players, ended 2-2.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Digested read
Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund – digested read
‘My ideal football match is one locked at 0-0 after 24 hours with more than half the players having died of exhaustion’
Illustration: Matt Blease
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John Crace
@JohnJCrace
Sunday 6 November 2016 17.00 GMT
Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 18.34 BST
D
ear Karl, I’ve landed now. As ever, my senses felt overloaded. Life and death is very close in Rio. Just off to the Copacabana beach for a swim. Can’t wait for the World Cup to begin.
Dear Fredrik, I’m sorry not to have replied sooner but I was asleep when your email arrived. I then had to get up and make breakfast for the children because Linda is away. It is enormously irritating to have to deal with the kids when I have so much of importance to write. But to business. I am smoking my third cigarette of the day and I find my thoughts are not entirely dissimilar to those I was having when I smoked the second, namely that I am quite happy to watch the World Cup on TV here in Sweden while you are in Rio. It also occurs to me that we might be able to turn the emails into a book so that we can get paid for doing what we were going to do anyway. By the way, I rather want Argentina to win. I have always admired their nihilism.
Dear Karl, writing a book about life and football sounds like a great idea. As you know I am a huge admirer of your My Struggle series. It’s interesting to hear you are supporting Argentina. I had imagined you might be a fan of Germany. Yesterday, I went to a transvestite bar before going to watch Brazil v Croatia with my friend Alonso in a favela. The passion for the beautiful game here is amazing.
Dear Fredrik, I slept through the second half of the opening game so managed to miss most of the excitement. But had I stayed awake, I guess I might have been as excited as you – though even if I wasn’t, it wouldn’t stop me writing about it. After all, what is a writer who doesn’t write? I am now going to do some shopping, have a shit and then take the kids out. I now quite like the look of Uruguay. I also quite admire England, though I suspect I may be alone in that.
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Dear Karl, it sounds as if you are very busy with your smoking, shitting and childcare arrangements. I’m not surprised you’ve managed to sleep through most of the tournament, but I am happy to update you. I’m now firmly behind Belgium. I’ve also been thinking about football and philosophy. Is it not just perfect that one of Brazil’s best ever players was called Socrates?
Dear Fredrik, your letter catches me at a rare moment when I am fully awake and not having to deal with the boredom of childcare. What you say about football, philosophy and national identity struck a chord with me as I am often referred to as the Norwegian Kant. The prevailing mood of the kulturmann in Sweden borders on the fascistic. It still upsets me when journalists accuse me of misogyny because they conflate my novels with real life. Just because everything in my books happened to me and I use people’s real names doesn’t make them true. God, I wish Linda was around so I could watch more football.
Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund (Harvill Secker, £18.99)
Dear Karl, the mood in Brazil is very sombre after they were dismantled 7-1 by Germany. It is as though the country has entered a period of national mourning. By the way, I have to take issue with you when you say Argentina totally outclassed Belgium in the quarter-finals. How can 1-0 be a thrashing?
Dear Fredrik, you get to the heart of why I am a bestselling writer who has been translated into many languages and you are not. My friend, you have not yet learned the art of making money out of contrarianism. Goals ruin football! My ideal game is one where two sides are still locked at 0-0 after 24 hours with more than half the players on both sides having died of exhaustion. By such a measure, a 1-0 win is totally outclassing the other team. Took the kids to the beach but it was full of nudists so we had to go straight back home.
Dear Karl, I watched the final with my friend Alonso in another favela. Germany were the better side but you must be disappointed Argentina lost. Won’t keep you, as I expect you have cigarettes to smoke.
Dear Fredrik, I slept through the final only to wake up and find I had sleep-typed another book. Not too sorry about the result as I remembered the pope is Argentinian and I wouldn’t have liked to entertain the possibility that religion had influenced the outcome. See you at the book launch.
Digested read, digested: Futility 0–1 Nihilism.
Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel, Out of This World, won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his novel A Time for Everything was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle: Book 1, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009, the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. My Struggle: Book 1 was a New Yorker Book of the Year and My Struggle: Book 2 was listed among The Wall Street Journal’s 2013 Books of the Year. My Struggle is a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and four children.Fredrik Ekelund was born in Sweden in 1953. He published his first book, Stuv Malmö, in 1984, and has since published another sixteen works—novels, detective novels, collections of poetry, and three books about soccer. Ekelund is also a playwright, and has made two films (with documentary filmmaker Lars Westman), as well as working as a translator specializing in Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.
Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game
Seth Satterlee
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game
Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund, trans, from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Sean Kinsella. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $16 trade paper (432p) ISBN 978-0-374- 27983-7
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Friends since meeting in a casual soccer game, novelist, poet, and translator Ekelund (Malmo Dockers, Report!) and bestselling novelist Knausgaard (My Struggle) have very different opinions about how the beautiful game should be played. Knausgaard believes in "Protestant football," where "efficiency, graft, pain, and suffering" win games. Ekelund prefers the "Dionysian"/eg0 bonito style of Brazil. In this fantastic book of correspondence covering the 2014 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, the two writers send reports back and forth (sometimes several times a day) analyzing and contextualizing the ups and downs of the sensational tournament, but also spinning off on tangents about the events of their daily lives, the state of global politics, and the relationship between writing and soccer; nothing is off the table in their free-wheeling, deeply personal letters.
Knausgaard watches the tournament on TV from Sweden between speaking commitments and trips to the beach with his four children. Ekelund is on the scene in Rio, taking the pulse of his Brazilian friends, exploring the streets, and playing the odd game of pick-up. Although soccer fans will get the most out of these lengthy discussions on players and tactics, readers with just a passing interest in the sport will be enlightened by their thorough exploration of how soccer has evolved over the years. And with Knausgaard and Ekelund situating themselves on opposite poles of soccer philosophy--"life-denying," negative soccer versus the energetic, positive jogo bonito--tension builds as the tournament moves through its most dramatic moments: Van Persies flying header, the Suarez bite, Brazil's 7-1 humiliation at the hands of the Germans. Thirsting for life but feeling he has "missed the bus" on becoming a bon vivant, Knausgaard relishes the physical, tactical games in which neither team is willing to give an inch. Ekelund would rather see an open game, ebbing and flowing in its pace and pressure.
Filled with, exquisite, solemn passages about the stark Scandinavian landscape and the quiet life of caring for children, Knausgaard's letters are the weightier of the two, constantly bringing the conversation back to geopolitical and metaphysical questions--the state of the individual in modern society, the dissolution of the collective, the nature of memory. Ekelund is quick to provide the antidote, with tales of working-class people on the outskirts of Rio, conversations with bartenders and metal workers about the recent surge of middle-class wealth. "Once again," Knausgaard writes, "I felt hot cheeks of shame because when you describe your world it is as if you are correcting mine."
As the book progresses, readers can see Knausgaard and Ekelund learning from each other, realizing new desires and prejudices, reevaluating former positions, repositioning themselves. The discourse is so open, so productive and thoughtful, that when readers reach the final letter, from Ekelund, sadness takes over; we can't read Knausgaard's reply. Hopefully they'll still be corresponding in 2018. (Jan.)
Reviewed by Seth Satterlee
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Satterlee, Seth. "Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224890&it=r&asid=d80acee6c1aab0d87c192370f39f4fd0. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224890
A game of two halves; Football writing
421.9014 (Nov. 5, 2016): p74(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game. By Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund. Harvill Secker; 412 pages. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January 2017.
"MY STRUGGLE", the six-volume, 3,600-page series of autobiographical books by Karl Ove Knausgaard, is a daunting work. In it he ruminates on his life and his thoughts, often in excruciating detail. Readers looking for a gentle introduction to Mr Knausgaard's work could do worse than pick up a copy of "Home and Away", a new book co-written with Fredrik Ekelund, a Swedish author.
The book is an exchange of letters between the two men, around the time of the 2014 World Cup, which was held in Brazil. With Mr Ekelund in Rio de Janeiro for the championship and Mr Knausgaard at home in Sweden, they write about the experience of watching the tournament from start to finish.
In common with Mr Knausgaard's other works, the book has its weak points. Both men have a habit of long, winding sentences with plenty of commas, which some readers may find tricky to follow. At various points, one of the authors raises an idea, but then the other fails to develop it, making it seem as though they are talking past each other. And in a book about football (where a certain amount of banality is inevitable), the writers repeatedly swap predictions about who will reach the final, which gets a little trying.
The trick is to let the writing wash over you, rather than fighting it, and even to skip certain passages. Happily, readers will find themselves needing to do this less and less in the second half of the book, as the final nears and both authors get into their stride.
Mr Knausgaard offers incisive observations on football in his typically understated tone, which can often be hilarious. "When do you see such elation in real life?" he wonders, describing a player who has just scored a goal: "Not even when a child is born do you see such comprehensive and systematic unalloyed joy." He (a middle-aged man) also perceives that "footballers on TV are always older than me," because "viewers watch in exactly the same way they did when they were 12." He may only be describing his feelings while watching a football match from his sofa, but as in his autobiographical "My Struggle" there is a sense that something bigger lurks beneath.
The best part of the book focuses on Brazil's 7-1 thrashing in the semi-final at the hands of Germany. Mr Knausgaard's description of David Luiz, a defender whose mistakes cost Brazil the game, captures the sense of panic at the Mineirao stadium. And Mr Ekelund's portrait of Rio after the match is haunting. He sees "a restaurant that's open but empty of customers, hundreds of vacant seats, and the rain pours." The morning after, the impersonal sounds of a city reluctantly back at work--"a jackhammer…a street cleaner sweeping up a pile of leaves, a taxi moving at full speed, a bus thundering inexorably on"--signify definitively that Brazil has been knocked out. For a book which, at heart, is no more than two friends chatting about football, there is a lot to like.
Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game.
By Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A game of two halves; Football writing." The Economist, 5 Nov. 2016, p. 74(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468732651&it=r&asid=0abe436b9656323bd547891f3fb700a5. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468732651
Review: Home and Away by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund explores the Beautiful Game
John Doyle
The Globe and Mail (includes correction)
Published Friday, May 05, 2017 9:54AM EDT
Last updated Friday, May 05, 2017 12:47PM EDT
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Title Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game
Author Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund, translated by Don Bartlett and Sean Kinsella
Genre Non-Fiction
Publisher Knopf Canada
Pages 412
Price $29.95
Here’s the thing about soccer writing: Nick Hornby ruined everything. Hornby’s Fever Pitch, first published in 1992, became genre-defining. His charming, lyrical style and self-deprecating defence of sports fandom came to determine what publishers wanted. They got it, too, and along came a stream of first-rate books about the culture of soccer, its allure and social meaning. Mind you, much of it was anchored in Hornby-esque boyish enthusiasm and, often, drenched in sentimentality. Seriousness, provocative arguments and blunt insight got pushed aside.
Eventually, we all had to turn back to the great Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow for crackling, startling perspectives on the game. A clear-eyed, wry intellectual, Galeano saw soccer in both small personal terms and as part of the great wheel of the world’s history. As it should be seen – local and international, micro and macro.
Now, along comes this odd, long, epistolary work by two serious men, both good writers, one a Norwegian, the other a Swede. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s name is in large type on the cover because he’s the best known, the author of the six-volume international cult hit My Struggle, a chronicle, largely plotless, of episodes from Knausgaard’s life. He writes about the mundane with a manic intensity for figuring out why we go on and on, living in the mundane.
Ekelund is a more eclectic literary figure. He’s written 16 books, from crime novels to collections of poetry, and three books about sport. He’s also a playwright and a documentary filmmaker. He is, as you might guess, the fun guy in the duo.
The set-up for Home and Away is pretty simple. For the duration of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Knausgaard is at home. He lives in Sweden now and he goes about his business of promoting his books, writing essays for newspapers, taking care of his kids and watching the World Cup on TV. Ekelund is in Brazil, mainly in Rio de Janeiro, a place he has visited many times and loves passionately. He, too, watches most of the World Cup on TV (he only attends one game, at the famous Maracana stadium in Rio), but in the bars, cafés and cantinas of urban Brazil, where the interest is intense. They send lengthy e-mails to each other – they are always called “letters” in the book – that debate the merits of teams and tactics, agonize over goals scored or missed opportunities. Both are soccer fanatics with encyclopedic knowledge of previous World Cup tournaments.
It takes a few lengthy e-mails to get a rhythm going. Ekelund is ecstatic to be in Rio. He plays soccer on the beach, drinks beer in beachside shacks and soaks in the beauty of the city. (I was in Rio for a month during the 2014 World Cup and can picture almost everything he enthuses about. He’s a good, vivid writer.) He is, like every local, expecting Brazil’s team to march through the tournament to a glorious victory in the final. That march went awry and that is really the spine of the book.
The meat of material about soccer as a way of understanding the human spirit and the twists of history comes from Knausgaard. He favours soccer matches that are tactically clever even if they result in a 0-0 draw. He is drawn to the cynicism of the traditional Italian style of play: all careful, crafty control of the space on the field and determined protection of a one-goal lead. He worships Andrea Pirlo, the great Italian midfielder who made ownership of the midfield seem effortless.
In one long letter to Ekelund, he speculates that his admiration for Italy is connected to his sense of self-worth. He argues that what he has always wanted is to appear to the world as a stylish man, clever, self-aware and having all his achievements seem effortless, born out of inherent skill. That’s what Italy represents to him. A way of life. Apparently, if he could be anyone in the world, he would be Pirlo. This is not an eccentric view. It’s a clever insight into the way every soccer fan, but especially literary men, project meaning onto the efforts of certain great players who merely move a round ball around a green field, for a living or for their country.
The book reaches a climax, after many, many digressions about Knausgaard’s four children and the trampoline he’s bought for them, and Ekelund’s blow-by-blow accounts of pickup soccer he plays with poets and musicians in Rio, with Brazil defeated 7-1 by Germany in the World Cup semi-final. Ekelund is stunned, stung and, it seems, near tears. Knausgaard writes little about it. He never was much of a fan of Brazil and the swaggering, self-destructive style of its play only made him long for the guile of Italy or Argentina. At one point, Knausgaard writes to his friend, “You are a romantic. I, on the other hand, am a Protestant deep into my bones. Brazil is not for me, nor is Brazilian life.” Neither of the two writers has much time or admiration for Germany, the eventual Word Cup champions.
What this sprawling, digressive and absorbing book amounts to is a series of conversations between a thoughtful, careful man – Knausgaard – who is unapologetically bookish, and a man who is an enthusiast and a hedonist: Ekelund. Both are correct about some aspects of soccer, both are wrong about other elements of the game. But in their arguments are genuinely fresh, sometimes ferociously shrewd observations about the game. The observations are those of grown-ups. Not boyish at all and it is no struggle for a soccer fan to revel in them.
John Doyle is The Globe’s TV critic, has covered numerous soccer tournaments and is the author of The World is a Ball: The Joy, Madness and Meaning of Soccer.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the World Cup in 2016. It was in 2014. This version has been corrected.
‘Home and Away,’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund
By Colin Fleming Published 4:41 pm, Wednesday, June 28, 2017
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Sometimes books don’t feel so much like books as an excuse to put something between covers that can go on a shelf that people will pay money for because the publishing industry has told them that they should.
When we’re talking an industry where pretense has sway over things that people could care about and things to make them feel, someone like Karl Ove Knausgaard becomes a writer you are told to like.
Publishing types like him because his work ultimately says nothing, as he obsesses over one subject after another — an early experiment masturbation, for instance — but does so with the veneer of what I think of as faux-life.
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Here’s the recipe: say nothing but make it look like you are, obsess over your navel, and load up the pretense like piles of impasto lurching toward the sky. Traffic in mediocrity, challenge, really, nothing, hold up no mirror to any actual lives, and enable people who live as you do — in a very scared way — and there you have it.
“Home and Away” is a collection of letters between the Norwegian Knausgaard — whose multi-volume “My Struggle” series (which is often called a novel, for some reason) epitomizes all of the above — and the Swedish writer Fredrik Ekelund, ostensibly about soccer and the World Cup in Brazil. Both men, obviously, entered this endeavor knowing it was a book project.
That’s the thing with letters — even if you’re writing them for posterity, they work so much better when this isn’t your discernible aim. And both of these guys — Knausgaard in particular — know they’re on the stage. It reads like an excuse to get out more product, and often like an exponentially gassier version of “My Dinner With Andre,” with some good bits sprinkled in.
As a general rule, it’s a relief when you turn a page and find an Ekelund missive waiting for you. He’s more conversational, with a better understanding of soccer, though soccer is often an excuse to talk about, say, music or Marxism. Knausgaard writes in those huge, blocky paragraphs of AP History books, where you settle in for what you’re going to read, and the body sighs one of those “ugh, here we go, time to try and plough through this” collective heavings of a broken will.
Knausgaard has a hard time staying awake through the matches he’s supposed to be watching because of this book contract, which is pretty amusing, metaphorically. He calls it football narcolepsy. Ekelund lives more out in the world. He goes on adventures to bad parts of town, gets drunk in bars with old friends and friends he doesn’t know terribly well, makes bad decisions about who he rides home with, and comes across as someone not afraid to leap into life.
This causes Knausgaard to get passive aggressive in a series of left-handed compliments before beginning his routine about how that’s not for him, he lives in his mind, etc. Knausgaard’s writing style is often called Proustian, which is so misleading, but he reminds me of the character Bloch in “Swann’s Way.” Bloch comes in from the rain, drenched, and someone asks him how long the weather has been so bad, and Bloch says he can’t tell, he doesn’t live in the world, but rather the refined realm of his thoughts. That would be our man Knausgaard, whom I started dubbing Captain Boring — CB for short — in my marginalia about 30 pages in.
What’s frustrating is that he could be so much more if he’d drop the endless machinations of “look how smart I am,” something that will never convince an astute person that you are.
One letter picks apart just what makes literature last and matter. It’s written by someone who actually knows, who never writes that way himself. What compunction is there to do so? You don’t need to in publishing. But you should need to for yourself. That’s how it is for any great artist. But that’s no more relevant here than the digressions about the best midfielders of the 1970s as another attempt to try and one-up the person you’re speaking to. Maybe just speak with them, and actually be in a real human moment?
Colin Fleming’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated and many other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com
Home and Away
Writing the Beautiful Game
By Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund; translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Seán Kinsella
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 412 pages; $16)