It is also insistent and clear-eyed in its politics: though Galeano dreamed of being a footballer when younger, he ended up a radical author, poet, journalist and analyst, whose works bent genre and form. And in one fell swoop he stood naked, then bit. In front of the open goal he licked his chops. The net was bridal veil of an irresistible girl. Meanwhile he slipped unnoticed into the box. Disguised as an old woman, his fangs and claws hidden, he strolled along, making a show of showering innocent passes and other works of charity. To pick one pretty much at random, here's Gerd Müller: And laced throughout, almost there in passing, are sketches of football's great players, taken out of the broader sweep of events and given their own spotlights. Not a chapterette - the book is shattered into more than 150 mini-chapters, the longest amounting to a few pages, the shortest no more than a couple of paragraphs - goes past without some line provoking a nod or a smile. After a diet of the analytical and the sardonic it's delightful and almost disconcerting to gorge on these crackling polemics and shameless love-letters.
Galeano (and his long-term translator Mark Fried) brings powerful, lyrical prose to the game, and to the history of the game a stylistic swagger and confidence that is lacking from everyday football writing. But what sets Sun and Shadow apart isn't just its scope, ambitious as that is. History to modernity, and on into the future.
Pakistani children sewed the high-tech ball for Adidas that started rolling on opening night in the stadium at Seoul: a rubber chamber, surrounded by a cloth net covered with foam, all inside a skin of white polymer decorated with the symbol of fire. It is, at heart, a history book, one that takes as its subject the whole broad sweep of the game, from the "time of the Pharoahs the Egyptians used a ball made of straw or the husks of seeds, wrapped in colourful cloths" to, in the 2003 re-printing, the World Cup in Japan and Korea, when:
Even if you don't enjoy it, there's nothing else like it. Published 20 years ago, Soccer in Sun and Shadow - whose author, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, died Monday at the age of 74 - stands among those few, and even those who might quibble with such status would have to agree that there really isn't anything to argue about. There are many good books about football there are few that have claims to greatness.
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