« Talladega Chili Peppers | Main | Hollywood Celebrates ThatKidInTheCorner Day! »

August 22, 2006

A Season With Verona: Book Report

After the World Cup, I pretty much needed to reread this

I bought my first copy of A Season With Verona at a book shop at Heathrow airport. This was back when I was on planes to the UK fairly frequently, and loading up on footy magazines and literature at the airport actually became a regular part of the trip. That is, it was rare when I would return to New York without the most recent editions of World Soccer or Four Four Two, and, if I was lucky, an actual book about soccer. Said copy of A Season With Verona still carries the "3 for the price of 2" sticker from the sales promotion at said book shop.

(Yes yes, I'm a giant nerd. Check.)

I bought my second copy of A Season With Verona from one of the guys on the southwest corner of 80th and Broadway. It was a secondhand hardcover edition, and for five dollars, I felt it was my obligation to purchase it. Better that I buy it and give it a safe home than leave it out there to the cruel whims of the Upper West Side secondhand book trade.

(Is 10024 the only zip code in America that can sustain a brisk street-level secondhand book trade? Possibly. If not, it's a pretty short list. That's probably one of the reasons I enjoyed living there.)

Obviously, I'm a big fan of this book, and have been flogging it to friends and family members for years, with a pretty high level of success. That is, most people who read it tend to enjoy it. Even folks who don't really care about soccer tend to like it.

Okay, so if I read this book years ago and have already recommended it to plenty of people, why bother with the Book Report?

Essentially, because Italy won the World Cup. And had a gigantic sports scandal. And if you're in the least bit curious about either of those things, this book is more relevant than ever. Of course, I have a little more interest in these topics than most -- and not just because the drunken Italian pig who was spitting his blood at me at the World Cup actually called me "Dio Cane." ("Dio Cane," or "Dog God," is a specific Italian soccer curse. Or something like that. Apparently it doesn't really translate.) How memorable is this book? Even in the midst of "trying to get the hell away from this filthy, blood-spewing lunatic and the mob of angry Italian fans behind him," I remember turning to my brother and excitedly whispering, "He just called me 'Dio Cane'! Just like in Verona!"

So yeah, I gave it another read. And it was just as good the second time around.

Title:A Season With Verona

Author: Tim Parks

Tags: soccer, calcio, Italy, football, Hellas Verona, Serie A, low-level hooliganism, racism, Italian regional rivalries and/ or prejudices, Italian swear words, relegation battles, books that are much better than The Miracle of Castel Del Sangro -- end-of-conversation, cat-eaters, '85 Scudetto, in my pants there's a bomba, Mauro Camoranesi, Luca Toni, Alberto Gilardino, vafanculo Pastorello.

If someone asked you to make a slide called "Key Takeaways," it would contain the following information: Even if you're not into soccer, or Italy, or Italian soccer, or the 2000-2001 Hellas Verona team's efforts to avoid relegation from Serie A, at its core this book is actually about what it means to root for a team -- the emotions and drama and community that seduce us poor bastards into actually caring whether the one group of millionaires is marginally more successful than the other group of millionaires (what I affectionately dub my "sports feelings"). Layer on top of that a very astutue potrait of contemporary Italy -- its media, its politics, its lingering regional rivalries and prejudices -- and you've got one of the best, if not the best, sports book I've ever read. And in the wake of the World Cup, if you want to begin to understand what that might mean to Italian culture, this is probably the book for you. Mostly, what this book does an absolutely spot-on job of capturing is the soul of sports-related post-adolescent male behavior: the phony posturing, the raw expressions of emotion, the escapism, and the self-awareness of it all. Tim Parks fundamentally gets the joke of being a rowdy sports fan: you're just there to yell and carry because you're allowed to; you don't actually mean anything by it (though you can't really apologize the racist stuff away even a little bit). Like I said, "sports feelings."

If I Could Meet Any Of The Featured Players: I guess it's pretty lame, but, well, Tim Parks. He obviously gets it. And by "gets it" I mean he would have no trouble understanding my infantile fascination with the Philadelphia Eagles, and certainly would see no inherent contradictions in said fascination and the other (relatively mature and grown-up) parts of my life. And he isn't a sports journalist; he's a novelist and academic who's apparently well-regarded. He just has the misfortune of having serious sports feelings.

Also, it's worth noting that you get descriptions of future Italian World Cup stars (Mauro Camoranesi, Alberto Gilardino) while they were still young and unknown, as well as a great set piece about Zinedine Zidane from his days at Juve. And all from the 2000-2001 season! Great stuff (and a big tip of the cap to pjdinho for being all over this).

The Super-Interesting Passages That I'm Looking Forward To Dropping On People In Casual Conversation That I Imagine Will Make Me Sound Smart: the opening chapter could stand on its own as a long-form piece of sports journalism; even if you're not going to read the whole book, you should read the opening chapter. Essentially, it's this long set piece about an overnight bus trip to the first game of the season, complete with drug-addled Italian teenagers repeatedly screaming "In my pants there's a bomba!"

Still, said set piece has nothing on the most prescient paragraph in the entire book (which will make a lot more sense if you watched any of Italy's games at the World Cup with me). Note again that this was written in the 2000-2001 season -- how little things have changed! The passage is taken from page 126 of the hardcover edition, in the chapter about the game against archrival Vicenza, whose fans the Veronese derisely call "cat-eaters" (a fantastic little piece of arcana in and of itself). Here you go:

Surely now we are going to win. We are the better team. We have equalised. But their centre-forward, Luca Toni, keeps falling over. He wins a free kick outside the box. They score again.

Seriously. I've been dumbfounded by those sentences for weeks now. He knows! How does he know? How? How? Tim Parks, you can see the future!

What I Still Want To Know: I need someone to fill me in on Hellas Verona since 2001. I've looked up the results, but what I really need is the story. What happened to the team? It looks like Pastorello is still around; did he just lose his touch with the talent evaluation? Did they run out of money? Make a couple bad moves? I really need to know this. I could also use a retrospective/ ESPN Classic treatment on the 1985 Hellas team that won the Scudetto. (Note: my throwback '85 Hellas shirt is easily one of my most prized soccer shirts; it was a helluva gift.)

Are They Going To Make a Movie?: maybe they'll pull a Fever Pitch and Americanize it and make it into a story about tortured loser Eagles fans. Oh wait. That would be awful. Please, please, please don't let that happen.

So I Should I Read It? owning two copies just makes it easier for me to loan you one of them. Of course you should read it.

Posted by thatkid at August 22, 2006 7:17 PM under Book Report

Comments

Post a comment

About ThatKid

Copyright (c) 2004-2007 thatkidinthecorner