Soccer

By Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Shaun Whiteside

Growing up in Belgium, soccer 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 soccer fandom taught him about life and the passage of time itself.
 
Soccer 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 soccer 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, Soccer 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781978804715

Jean-Philippe Toussaint

 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 . 

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Soccer

Soccer

Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Toussaint, Jean-Philippe, author. | Whiteside, Shaun, translator.

Title: Soccer / Jean-Philippe Toussaint ; translated by Shaun Whiteside.

Other titles: Football. English

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2019. | First published in France as La Mélancolie de Zidane © 2006 and Football © 2015 by Les Editions—Title verso.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018027713 | ISBN 9781978804203 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978804197 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781978804715 (epub) | ISBN 9781978804739 (web PDF) | ISBN 9781978804722 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Soccer—Anecdotes. | World Cup (Soccer) | Soccer fans. | Toussaint, Jean-Philippe.

Classification: LCC GV943.2 .T5913 2019 | DDC 796.334—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027713

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © Jean-Philippe Toussaint, 2015

Translation copyright © Shaun Whiteside, 2016

Originally published in the United States of America and Canada by Rutgers University Press in 2019.

First published in France as LA MELANCOLIE DE ZIDANE © 2006 and FOOTBALL © 2015 by Les Editions de Minuit, 7, rue Bernard-Palissy, 75006 Paris.

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

‘For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last thirty years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? . . . Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint . . . Toussaint’s writing is remarkable for its conciseness, its elision.’

Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island

‘Toussaint is carving out one of the most fascinating literary oeuvres of our times.’

Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

‘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’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

‘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

This is a book that no one will like – not intellectuals, who aren’t interested in football, or football-lovers, who will find it too intellectual. But I had to write it; I didn’t want to break the fine thread that still connects me to the world.

Contents

Chapter 1. 1998

Chapter 2. France, 1998

Chapter 3. Korea/Japan, 2002

Chapter 4. Germany, 2006

Chapter 5. South Africa, 2010

Chapter 6. Brazil, 2014

Chapter 7. Zidane’s Melancholy

About the Author

About the Translator

1

1998

This story begins in 1998, with this date that suddenly strikes me as far away, sunk in the past, already buried heavily away in the finished twentieth century, which will seem to future generations as if it’s from another era. It’s an eminently strange number, this 1998, with this 1 and this 9 already looking so outmoded to our contemporary eyes, as if this date, 1998 – though so close to us, though still so intimately connected to our lives, to our time, to our flesh and to our history, to our kisses and to our sorrows – had accidentally sunk its teeth into the edge of the previous century and, inadvertently, found its feet dangling in the past. It’s not our fault, but we are compromised by this past which we would have preferred to avoid. We know instinctively that the past, when we discover it in old photographs or archive pictures, always has a slightly awkward aspect to it, stiff, touching, even laughable, while the present – which is in fact merely its exact anticipation – is by contrast serious, reliable and worthy of respect. But it is in 1998 that this story begins: Jean, my son, was nine years old; Anna, my daughter, was four. It was in 1998, very precisely on 10 June 1998, that for the first time in my life I went to a stadium to see a World Cup football match. The dates of the World Cups that followed – 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014 – are dates that might be called synonyms for 1998, but they are by no means homonyms, because they escape the withering of those strange and antiquated numbers, the 1 and 9 that mark them with a red light, like the lily on the shoulder of Milady de Winter, and inscribe them irrevocably in the past. Yes, 1998 is an old-fashioned date, a date that has aged badly, a date that had almost ‘expired in its own lifetime’, to repeat an expression I used in one of my novels, a date ‘patinated by time, as if from the outset it bore within itself, like a corrosive poison hidden inside, the seed of its own dissolution, its definitive disappearance in the vast rush of time’.

Wonder

Football, like painting according to Leonardo da Vinci, is a cosa mentale; it is in the imagination that it is measured and appreciated. The nature of the wonder that football provokes derives from the fantasies of triumph and omnipotence that it generates in our minds. With my eyes closed, whatever my age and my physical condition, I am the star striker who scores the winning goal or the goalkeeper who throws himself in slow