Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano

The FIFA Women's World Cup is happening in Edmonton and I have friends with tickets to every event. Not that I have any desire to watch soccer myself, but people around me are talking about the sport, so I decided to experience it in my own way: via a book. Of course.

Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow turned out to be so much more interesting than I had imagined. Originally published in 1995, the edition that I read was revised and updated in 2013 and translated by Mark Fried. I loved it! The chapters are more like vignettes consisting of a few paragraphs. Galeano's style is engaging and the book is packed with fun facts. I kept wanting to read passages aloud to anyone who would listen.

    "In 1988 Mexican journalist Miguel Angel Ramirez discovered a fountain of youth. Several players on Mexico's junior team, who were two, three, and even six years beyond the age limit, had been bathed in the magic waters: the directors falsified their birth certificates and fabricated fake passports. This treatment was so effective that one player managed to become two years younger than his twin brother."

I learned that Albert Camus played soccer for the University of Algiers in 1930. "He had been playing goalkeeper since childhood, because in that position your shoes don't wear out as fast. Son of a poor home, Camus could not afford the luxury of running the fields; every night, his grandmother examined the soles of his shoes and gave him a beating if she found them worn."

One anecdote sounds like something from the Welcome to Night Vale podcast. In 1953, a Catholic priest offered a guarantee of victory to the Brazilian team Flamengo, provided the players attended his mass before each match and said the rosary while kneeling before the altar. Flamengo won the championship three years in a row and their rivals protested that divine help was unfair.

    "Steve Berlusconi, owner of Milan, forbade fans from singing the club's anthem, the traditional chant 'Milan, Milan,' because its malevolent vibrations paralyzed his players' legs."

  "A leading Spanish player, Pablo Hernandez Coronado, says that when Real Madrid refurbished its stadium the team went six years without winning a championship, until a fan broke the curse by burying a head of garlic in the center of the playing field."

When San Lorenzo's stadium in Buenos Aires was demolished in 1983, "weeping fans carried off fistfuls of dirt in their pockets."

    "There are towns and villages in Brazil that have no church, but not a one lacks a soccer field. Sunday is the day of hard labour for cardiologists all over the country. On a normal Sunday people die of excitement during the mass of the ball. On a Sunday without soccer, people die of boredom."

During the German occupation in 1942, Ukraine's Dynamo Kiev "committed the insane act of defeating Hitler's squad in the local stadium. Having been warned, 'If you win, you die,' they started out resigned to losing, trembling with fear and hunger, but in the end they could not contain their yearning for dignity. When the match was over, all eleven were shot with their club shirts on at the edge of a cliff."

Galeano gives a brief summary of every World Cup (played by men), making liberal use of corny metaphor. In 1962, "The Chileans had beaten Italy in a match that was a pitched battle, and they also beat Switzerland and the Soviet Union. They gobbled up the spaghetti, chocolate, and vodka, but choked on the coffee: Brazil won 4-2."

Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, one of my favourite books, is a fictionalized account of a tragedy Galeano places under the heading 'Fervor:'

 "In April 1997 guerrillas occupying the Japanese embassy in the city of Lima were gunned down. When commandos burst in and carried out their spectacular lightning butchery, the guerrillas were playing soccer. Their leader, Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, died wearing the colours of Alianza, the club he loved.

     Few things happen in Latin America that do not have some direct or indirect relation with soccer. Whether a shared celebration or a shipwreck that takes us all down, soccer counts in Latin America, sometimes more than anything else, even if the ideologues who love humanity but can't stand people don't realize it."

At the 1966 World Cup in England: "Someone had stolen the Rimet Cup, but a dog named Pickles found it in a London garden, and the trophy reached the winner's hands in time. England won 4-2. [...] Queen Elizabeth gave Alf Ramsey, the manager of the victorious team, a title of nobility, and Pickles became a national hero."

A few paragraphs of current affairs, expressed in tongue-in-cheek headlines, places each World Cup in historical context. i.e. 1954: "General Stroessner was being elected president of Paraguay in a close contest against himself. In Brazil the noose tied by businessmen and officers, money and guns, was tightening around President Getulio Vargas and soon he would burst his heart with a bullet. US planes were bombing Guatemala with the blessing of the OAS, and an army created by that northern power was invading, killing, and winning. While in Switzerland the national anthems of sixteen countries were being sung to inaugurate the fifth World Cup, in Guatemala the victors were singing 'The Star Spangled Banner' and celebrating the fall of President Arbenz, whose Marxist-Leninist ideology had been laid bare when he touched the lands of the United Fruit Company."

1994: "Serbs, Croats, and Muslims were killing each other in the pieces that had been Yugoslavia. In Rwanda something similar was happening, but television spoke of tribes, not peoples, and implied that the violence was the sort of thing black people do."

Galeano exposes the racism in professional sports, including the fact that "black players earn less than white ones." In 1916, "Uruguay was the only country in the world with black players on its national team."

Someone in my house happens
to be a former sports journalist
and so we just happen to have
a Zidane figure on a bookshelf. 

2006 World Cup: "French political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen declared that the country could not see itself in its players, for nearly all were black, and he added that its captain Zinedine Zidane, more Algerian than French, refused to sing the national anthem. The vice president of the Italian senate, Roberto Calderoli, echoed the sentiment saying that the French team consisted of blacks, Islamists, and Communists who preferred 'l'Internationale' to 'La Marseillaise' and Mecca to Bethlehem. Earlier, the coach of the Spanish team, Luis Aragones, called French player Thierry Henry a 'black piece of shit,' and president in perpetuity of South American soccer, Nicolas Leoz, opened his autobiography by saying he had been born 'in a town populated by thirty people and a hundred Indians.'
      At the end of the tournament, in practically the final moment of the final match, a bull charged: Zidane, who was saying farewell to soccer, head-butted a rival who had been needling him with the sort of insult that lunatic fans like to shriek from the upper decks. The insulter got flattened and the insulted got a red card from the referee and jeers from a crowd poised until then to give him an ovation. And Zidane left the field for good.
     Still, this was his World Cup. He was the best player of the tournament, despite that final act of insanity or integrity, depending on how you look at it. Thanks to his beautiful moves, thanks to his melancholy elegance, we could still believe that soccer was not irredeemably condemned to mediocrity."

I don't follow sports, but I had already been made aware of what happened with Zidane because of reading Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric. She uses Zidane as an example in the larger context of racism in contemporary society.
 
FIFA's corruption comes under Galeano's witty scrutiny. "Like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, FIFA's unjust system sentences first and tries later, so there will be plenty of time to cover up."

illustration by John Tenniel

    "Play has become spectacle, with few protagonists and many spectators, soccer for watching. And that spectacle has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organized not to facilitate play but to impede it. The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength, a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy, and outlaws daring."

    "The goal is soccer's orgasm. And like orgasms, goals have become an ever less frequent occurrence in modern life. Half a century ago, it was a rare thing for a match to end scoreless: 0-0, two open mouths, two yawns."

This book is the opposite a yawn. Galeano's lively passion for the game has so enchanted me that I might even consider watching one of the women's World Cup games.

A Little Book of Sloth by Lucy Cooke

Is there anything more adorable than a baby sloth? At a sanctuary in Costa Rica, Lucy Cooke found cuddle puddles of these cute creatures to feature in A Little Book of Sloth.

There are two kinds there: Bradypus, "the Muppet with the medieval haircut and Mona Lisa smile," and Choloepus, who "look more like a cross between a Wookie and a pig."

They are the most laid-back of animals. They mostly hang out, eat and sleep. Very occasionally, a fight breaks out -- "a very, very slow fight, in which the winner is the last sloth to stay awake."

It isn't all about cute photos and word play; I also learned all kinds of fascinating stuff. Did you know it takes four weeks for a sloth to digest one meal? In the wild, sloths have an invisibility cloak, made of algae and insects, to protect them from predators. Find out more at the Aviarios del Caribe sloth sanctuary website. Also, check out the Sloth Appreciation Society website.

Enjoy sharing this book with children of any age. It's Family Literacy Day today!

Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois

Lily Hayes and Katy Kellers are 21-year-old Americans living with an Argentine family while they spend a scholarship semester in Buenos Aires. Five weeks after they meet, Lily is charged with the murder of her roommate. After initial questioning by police (without a lawyer), Lily was left alone in the interrogation room. She then turned a cartwheel, a fact widely debated in the media frenzy surrounding the investigation. Is this an indicator of guilt or innocence?

In Cartwheel, Jennifer duBois keeps switching to different points of view, allowing readers to approach the murder from different angles. Appearances are deceiving, as evidenced by the following three interpretations of the same photos on Lily's camera.

"There was a picture of Lily standing in front of a church, and Andrew grimaced again at what she was wearing: a low-cut top, one of those cheap, flimsy things she bought at deep-discount clothes warehouses. All the women around her were dressed conservatively. Had she really not noticed? [...] In one photo, Lily licks salt from her hand; in the next, she sucks on a lime." (Lily's father, Andrew Hayes)

"And here is Lily Hayes, standing in front of the Basilica Nuestra Senora de Lujan, her prodigious bosom spilling out over a too-tight tank top. She is nearly aglow with the light of her narcissism. Does she notice that all the other women are modestly dressed, that their heads are covered? She either does not notice, or she does not care. A person who does not notice is silly. A person who does not care is dangerous." (Eduardo Campos, the chief prosecutor)

"She spent a day taking the train out to the basilica in Lujan to try to see what all the Catholic fuss was about. She sat in bars drinking Quilmes and trying to look mysterious; she sat in cafes eating alfajors and licking powdered sugar off her fingers and not minding that she looked silly." (Lily)

Even more interesting than the puzzle of who committed the murder, are duBois' character portrayals. The entire Hayes family, broken by the death of their first daughter, many years earlier. Sebastien, Lily's agoraphobic and eccentric boyfriend next door. Unhappy Eduardo and his unstable wife, Maria.

"Eduardo did not blink. His own depression was a thing with claws and teeth and eyes, its own set of tics and preoccupations and prejudices, its own entire integrated personality. The trick to not killing yourself was to convince yourself, every single day, that your departure from the world would have a devastating effect on absolutely everyone around you, despite consistent evidence to the contrary."

I love books like this that present reality as something that shifts, depending on perspective. Cartwheel is a satisfying page-turner that leaves room for speculation beyond the final lines.

Readalikes: Five Star Billionaire (Tash Aw); You Are One of Them (Elliott Holt); So Much Pretty (Cara Hoffman); Where Things Come Back (John Corey Whaley); The Monkey's Mask (Dorothy Porter).

Caught by Lisa Moore

Lisa Moore's Caught is a high-stakes adventure that begins in the Maritimes in 1978 when David Slaney crawls under a fence and escapes from prison. Slaney is on the run, across Canada and then onward to South America, never sure who he can trust. He is determined that he will never be locked up again.

RCMP Inspector Patterson is close on Slaney's heels. He is determined to gain a long-overdue promotion by capturing Slaney and his accomplices.

This book has everything I love: great characters, a strong sense of place, an engaging plot and an elegant way with language.

Slaney is an entirely sympathetic young man who has made some bad choices. He meets all kinds of interesting people on his travels.

A salesclerk in a Montreal toy store knew that Slaney "was Anglo by the look of him and addressed him in English. She flattened everything she said like she was running it through a ringer washer. All the th's were d's and she was dropping h's and she was emphatic. Her vowels had carbuncles and she resented having to spit them out and it was as sexy as anything Slaney had ever heard."

Slaney spent weeks on a boat in the company of a different young woman. "Ada was reading murder mysteries and Hemingway and she had a Fitzgerald and a really good Dashiell Hammett, she said, and when she was done she tossed them over the side." (That image will stay with me!)

Faith is explored from different angles. An orgasm is likened to a sacrament: "She spoke a few words and it was a phrase from a prayer." And then religion pops up again on the very next page: "Three soldiers took the bag below deck to count the money and they all waited in the hot sun with their heads bowed, silent, as though in church." A little later, "There was the ridiculous golden light, liturgical and autumnal, touching everything glass and metal."

Are our lives subject to some divine plan? "The best stories, he thought, we've known the end from the beginning."

We are mortal, and so in life it is our journeys that matter, not our end. In fiction, I want both: a good trip and a good ending. Moore delivers both in Caught.

It happened that I was listening to Piper Kerman's memoir Orange Is the New Black during the same stretch of time that I was reading Caught. It was a bit surreal, contrasting fiction and nonfiction about serving time for criminal activity relating to drugs, but also a good pairing.

Nocturne: Dream Recipes Varied and Easy to Make (in just 5 minutes) by Isol

I was up very late watching spectacular Canada Day fireworks over the North Saskatchewan river in Edmonton, so a book about sleep is perfect for this morning.

Nocturne is the singular creation of Isol, an Argentine illustrator who received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award earlier this year. More artifact than book, Nocturne is coil-bound at the top and has a base that unfolds to make it stand sturdily at bedside. Two different whimsical illustrations are superimposed on each page, one printed with glow-in-the-dark ink.

"Before you go to sleep, open the book to the dream you've chosen and place it on your night table under a bright light. (A dream is like a moth that loves to get close to the light when no one is looking.) Wait for a least 5 minutes, and don't make any noise or you will scare the dream away. [...] Turn out the light! You will see the luminous traces that the dream leaves behind on the page. Look for as long as you like, then close your eyes and follow the dream to its hiding place."

Included are: the boring book Dream (with giant animals peering down at a reader who has fallen asleep); the Dream of going far away (to find friendly aliens on another planet); and the Dream underwater (complete with mermaid). In the Dream of growing, a girl waters three seeds under a tiny orange sun. The phosphorescent image shows the girl riding the tops of the grown plants, with the sun in the location of her heart. Magical!

The Cats of Tanglewood Forest, another children's book that I've read recently, coincidentally mentions dreams. In De Lint's book, under the branches of an ancient beech, "cats would come to dream and be dreamed." Nocturne offers a wonderful opportunity for adults to talk about dreams and dreaming with young people from about Grade 2 and up.

Children who enjoy Nocturne might also like The Dreamer (Pam Munoz Ryan) with its surreal illustrations by Peter Sis; Stormy Night (Michele Lemieux) about the thorny philosophical questions that keep us from sleeping; and The Rabbit Problem (Emily Gravett) another quirky book that is more of an artifact than container for a story.

The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder

When my YA book discussion group chose to read Carrie Snyder's The Juliet Stories, I had already  placed it on hold at the library because it was shortlisted for the Canadian Governor General's Awards. (The group occasionally reads adult titles, like this one, that have appeal for teen readers.) I didn't end up making it to the discussion because I had to work that evening, but I hadn't yet read the book anyway. I've only just now finished it, actually, having several other books on the go at the same time.

I liked The Juliet Stories very much. The weird thing is that I never noticed that the book is a series of interconnected short stories until I'd finished it. I assumed it was a novel and didn't read the inside flap or back cover until today: "A stunning new novel-in-stories set against the backdrop of the political turmoil in 1980s revolutionary Nicaragua." The 's' on the end of 'Stories' should have clued me in. I love story-cycles in general but this is the first time I've read one all the way through without noticing the format. When I'm reading short stories, I usually read them one at a time, interspersing them with other reading. And that's exactly what I did with The Juliet Stories, putting it down between chapters.

One of the things that I read in-between was a post on the Ken Haycock blog which looked at readers who skip between books like I do. It's actually about how books in digital format allow companies to track reading behaviours.

"Barnes and Noble has determined, through analyzing Nook data, that nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts, while novels are generally read straight through, and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier. Science fiction, romance and crime fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start. Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend to skip around between books." (Your E-Book is Reading You.)

Anyway, back to Carrie Snyder's wonderful stories/novel. The nuances of family relationships - between siblings, between husband and wife, and between parents and children -- are deftly delineated. Setting -- both time and place -- is another of Snyder's strengths, especially as seen through a child's experience.

"Ronald Reagan is the president of the United States of America. He is fighting the commies. Commie is short for communist, a thick plank of a word that is used often and ominously on American television; on American television communist means evil. But Juliet takes her definition from Gloria, who says that communists are people who share everything. (Imagine fighting against people who share! It is the punchline to a joke. Juliet writes a skit on the subject, and Keith plays Ronald Reagan with gusto: "I declare a war on sharing! There will be no more sharing!")"

Later, when Juliet's family moves from Nicaragua to Canada, there's a whole new cultural environment to negotiate. "Hockey is a violent sport that rewards angry men and boys. Ringette is an unsolved feminine mystery."

Snyder's memorable characters and poignant insights into family dynamics make The Juliet Stories a very rewarding book -- whether it is approached as a single novel or as individual stories.

Readalike: The Forrests by Emily Perkins

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Escape to the deepest Amazon in Ann Patchett's wonderful new novel. Dr. Marina Singh leaves her Minnesota existence far behind when she travels to Manaus in Brazil to find out what happened to her colleague and lab partner, Anders Eckman. Their employer is Vogel, a giant pharmaceutical company, which has been funding top secret research among the Lakashi people. The Lakashi women remain fertile and bear children well into their 70s. Dr. Annick Swenson is the formidable scientist heading the research, and she is also Marina's former professor. Another complication is Jim Fox, head of Vogel, who has been having a clandestine romantic relationship with Marina for over a year, since his wife died.

Patchett has created a rich cast of characters, a vivid setting and surprising plot twists. The ending is the biggest treat of all. The narrative arc comes to a satisfying conclusion, yet so much possibility remains open for the characters to make further choices and to live on beyond the final pages. Very highly recommended!

The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan and Peter Sis

When he was in his teens, Neftali Reyes chose a pseudonym, Pablo Neruda, in order to avoid confrontation with his father when his work appeared in publications. Neftali was a shy, daydreaming boy, bullied by his father. In this fictionalized biography for children, Pam Munoz Ryan uses narrative prose, magic realism and poetry to evoke Neruda's childhood in Chile. Czech artist Peter Sis contributes surreal illustrations that enhance the feeling of what it was like to grow up awkward around people, yet full of curiosity about the natural world. He was fascinated by beetles, pine cones, clouds... everything except his schoolwork. A summer trip to the seashore should have been heavenly, but Neftali's father had an ulterior motive: to toughen up his weakling son and young daughter. The two children were forced to spend hours in the ocean, struggling to keep from drowning. Neftali managed to defy his father and snuck away to read in the afternoons. I admired his strength of spirit.

The book is a pleasure to read. Scholastic Press 2010 USA edition is printed in green ink on cream paper with wide leading between lines. It can be enjoyed by readers from Grade 4 up to adult. A selection of Neruda's poems appear at the back.

Libertad by Alma Fullerton

Two children, Libertad and Julio, live with their mother at the edge of a garbage dump in Guatemala City. Every day, they work collecting cardboard to sell. When an accident kills their mother, they decide to find their father who went to the United States five years earlier. A moving account told in verse novel format and based on the journey of a real boy, combined with other children's actual experiences. Grade 4 to 8.

Similar stories about working children in other parts of the contemporary world:

Iqbal (carpet weavers in Pakistan) by Francesco D'Adamo

I Am a Taxi (children of incarcerated parents in Bolivia) and The Breadwinner (a girl disguised as a boy supports her family in Afghanistan), both by Deborah Ellis

Similar verse novels:

Home of the Brave (An orphaned young Sudanese refugee) by Katherine Applegate

Downtown Boy (Chicano child of migrant workers in 1950s California) by Juan Felipe Herrera

Similar story of illegal immigrants to the U.S.A.:

Red Glass by Laura Resau