Can the heart endure another feat, another glory, another party? After the World Cup in which Argentina became champion, what else? The Copa América begins and the enthusiasm is intact. Below are four books that came out recently and that deserve special attention. Football is passion, but also reflection, invention and history. What better than literature to extend the possibilities of continuing to think about the ball, even to unexpected areas?
“Writing about football in Spanish confronts us with some paradoxes. The first: football is an epic language par excellence.” so it begins Diary of a messianic timebook that Julia Kornberg and Paula Puebla they wrote while the World Cup in Qatar was being played and that the 17grises stamp published. The first chapter is dated November 20, 2022, during the inaugural show (the title is curious: “Cruel Optimism”), and ended on December 18 and 20, during the celebrations.
It is a football book, without a doubt. On the cover, a drawing of the World Cup floats on an Argentinian light blue. But it is much more than that. The authors, who sometimes fuse their voice, other times it is an open dialogue, go through the World Cup scenes, the matches, the players, but they also develop various readings, invoke reflections on the national, on the homeland, thread ideas about popular culture , about the strange world we inhabit, about what we are.
On the back cover, Juan José Becerra He says that from Qatar 2022 “the fruits of collective happiness emerge, with a paradoxical reservation: that happiness for everyone belongs only to one (from the deepest part of each one).” And he adds: “Puebla and Kornberg cover with sensitive intelligence, literary attention and desperate perceptions (no wonder) every moment of that crazy month that shines in eternity. It is a tribute in real time within the glory.”
Let’s go to the past: how did football arrive in Argentina? Where was the first field created? And the first large stadium? When were the fans, fanaticism for the club, the inter-neighborhood classics born? When were they born? is the AFA born? These are some questions that are asked Leonel Contrerasspecialist in History of the City of Buenos Aires, and which he addresses in great detail in his new book, Soccer, Buenos Aires passionedited by El Ateneo.
Contreras was born in Buenos Aires in 1976, graduated in History in 1999 and in 2020 was named “Porteño Historian” by the Legislature. He wrote several books about the city and its characters: The legend of Petiso Orejudo, Buenos Aires skyscrapers: history of high-rise construction in Buenos Aires (1580-2005), Buenos Aires football: clubs, fields and stadiums in the Federal Capital from 1867 to the present and Chronological history of the City of Buenos Aires (1580-2014).
Many readers discovered their love of books by reading football stories. This book can be a great opportunity for those who do not usually spend time reading; maybe they will discover a new world. It reads on the back cover: “Soccer, Buenos Aires passion guides us on an unmissable journey in which we will discover the Buenos Aires origins of this popular sport that is passion, madness and identity of Argentines, from 1867 to the present day.
Many football stories have been written, the sporting epic has been narrated in a thousand ways, literature has navigated with ease the tributaries of passion, but what Nicolas Guglielmetti In his new book it is something else. Under the title Can robots dominate world football? (novel published by the UOIEA label!), the poet and narrator from Bahia launches into telling a story that mixes science fiction, paranoia, success, failure, power and friendship.
Toro is an Argentine soccer player who failed in the final of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. In these circumstances, a failure is not just a mistake, a mistake: it is denying glory to an entire people. Nico, his great friend, who longs to write his biography to redeem him, wonders if there was a secret plan for Argentina to lose that fateful match against Germany. In this way, a story is woven, at times delirious, full of dialogues, with football as its north.
A fragment: “If his definition had been perfect, if that parable had obeyed his desire, which was neither more nor less than the desire of each of the millions of Argentines, we would have urinated from the top of Christ the Redeemer into that tide of Brazilians and Teutons united more by hatred than by affiliation. Is there anything more degrading than being humiliated by someone and joining them in pain? There you have them calling us ‘Indians’ as if that were an offense.”
From the cradle to Japan. With that unappealable title, Fernando Ariel Gandaras tells the story of Eduardo, a fan like so many others, and his life with the club of his loves for 30 years: Independiente. Published by the publisher Football Book Under its “Hattrick” imprint, the book rescues the joys and sorrows, feats and defeats of someone who wears the colors of his team to the surface and in this case also, his shield before everything.
Gandaras is, of course, an Independiente fan: he inherited the passion from his father, who had previously received them from his own father. Teacher, facilitator and instructor, he currently works as Technical Director and Youth Coordinator of the Bays United Football Club in the city of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Since May 2023 he has been a producer, scriptwriter and host of the Podcast King’s Squiresavailable on Spotify.
From the back cover, Luciano Olivera —storyteller, novelist, fan of Independiente—recommends reading From the cradle to Japan, follow the protagonist, Eduardo, and walk “with him the streets of that Avellaneda where you could already breathe the sulfur of a Devil about to do his thing. And above all, be happy again because you, me, Fernando, your dad and all those who blew from above, did it again. And in another’s detour.”
