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Books : A Season with Verona
Rating: 
- Tired and predictable
This book is essentially Fever Pitch set in Italy and giving the same quasi-intellectual attempt to "explain" football fans. Any true fan of a team doesn't need to try to explain it in several hundred pages of repetitive inaccurate bilge.
The same tired old themes get trotted out again and again. All that really needs to be said is that people go to football because they enjoy it. Whether they enjoy seeing a successful team win, masochistically enjoy seeing a poor team lose, or for the vast majority of fans a bit of both, that's all there is. Any attempt to rationalise it further is doomed to failure and is pretentious and patronising.
Two real annoyances - the glaring factual errors (Vieira is a midfielder not a striker!) and the continuing use of inane quotes from the Verona website discussion boards.
Please can writers stop writing boring books about football. They could maybe just write some stories and let the real football fans just get on with supporting their team without having to refer to Schopenhauer & Nietzsche.
Rating:
- Unputdownable - Every football supporter should read it.
What a great book, it accurately describes the elation, pain angusih and heartache suffered by every true fan of every small team. Mixed with excellent descriptions of the various locations creating just the right atmosphere - even the songs are the same!. Very few travel based books have held my attention in the way this has- Tim Parks achieves this by maintaining an excellent balance between the neutral narrator and the rabid fan!
Excellent work!
Rating: - Great stuff
One of the best books about football ever, and a superb dissection of contemporary Italy to boot.
Parks supports unfashionable, vilified Hellas Verona - he's lived in the Veneto for more than 20 years. Last season he went to every game, home and away, and his account of the travails of the club is a potent critique of fandom.
Not one for the kind of people who think books about football should be written in the platitudinous style of the mainstream press and inarticulate "pundits", but a great (and original) essay on what it means to be a football supporter and the unique joys and trials of Italy's Serie A.
- Tired and predictableThis book is essentially Fever Pitch set in Italy and giving the same quasi-intellectual attempt to "explain" football fans. Any true fan of a team doesn't need to try to explain it in several hundred pages of repetitive inaccurate bilge.
The same tired old themes get trotted out again and again. All that really needs to be said is that people go to football because they enjoy it. Whether they enjoy seeing a successful team win, masochistically enjoy seeing a poor team lose, or for the vast majority of fans a bit of both, that's all there is. Any attempt to rationalise it further is doomed to failure and is pretentious and patronising.
Two real annoyances - the glaring factual errors (Vieira is a midfielder not a striker!) and the continuing use of inane quotes from the Verona website discussion boards.
Please can writers stop writing boring books about football. They could maybe just write some stories and let the real football fans just get on with supporting their team without having to refer to Schopenhauer & Nietzsche.
Rating:
- Unputdownable - Every football supporter should read it.What a great book, it accurately describes the elation, pain angusih and heartache suffered by every true fan of every small team. Mixed with excellent descriptions of the various locations creating just the right atmosphere - even the songs are the same!. Very few travel based books have held my attention in the way this has- Tim Parks achieves this by maintaining an excellent balance between the neutral narrator and the rabid fan!
Excellent work!
Rating:
- Great stuffOne of the best books about football ever, and a superb dissection of contemporary Italy to boot.
Parks supports unfashionable, vilified Hellas Verona - he's lived in the Veneto for more than 20 years. Last season he went to every game, home and away, and his account of the travails of the club is a potent critique of fandom.
Not one for the kind of people who think books about football should be written in the platitudinous style of the mainstream press and inarticulate "pundits", but a great (and original) essay on what it means to be a football supporter and the unique joys and trials of Italy's Serie A.