The midsummer night of 2018 ushered in the quadrennial "World Cup" football match. At this time, football can attract countless fanatical (pseudo)fans, and the title of "world's first sport" is by no means a waste of time. One wonders whether imaginative novelists would incorporate elements of football into their creations to capture the attention of readers.
Lieutenant Gao and the goalkeeper
The answer is probably yes.
As we all know, the predecessor of football is the "Keju" invented in ancient China. The term "Keju" first appeared in the Chronicle of Su Qin, who, when lobbying King Xuan of Qi, described Linzi, the capital of the State of Qi, as "very rich and real, and its people were all trumpeters, drummers, and bowers." As early as the Spring and Autumn Warring States period more than 2,000 years ago, Keju was already loved by the public.
With the continuous development of Keju, it gradually integrated into literary creation. The famous Ming Dynasty novel "Jin Ping Mei" has repeatedly mentioned the clumsy disciple Keju who has nothing to do all day, for example, the fifteenth time of the book ("The Lady Laughs and Enjoys the Lamp Building Fox Helps the Prostitute Li Chun Yuan"), which describes in detail the scene of Ximen Qing in the Li Chun Yuan. At first, the Ximen official was playing football alone and running for a while; later he taught Gui Jie, "with two round club kicks, one head, one obstacle, hook kicking and kidnapping, all of them are full of praise and flattery." The two of them couldn't breathe for a while, and they felt back pain, and then Ximen Qing took a cool shower next to them, watching Gui Jie and Xie Xida and others play football.
Keju
Judging from the fact that he was quickly exhausted, Ximen Qing could probably only be regarded as an amateur football player, and the number one star in the classical novel was naturally Gao Li. Shi Nai'an wrote in the second episode of "Water Margin" that because "the most kick is a good kick", everyone "calls him a high hub". Later, "the word Qi was removed from Mao Ping, and he was added as a Liren, and he changed his surname to Gao and Li. "Water Margin" next tells gao li about gao qi's superb bow skills, and makes a detailed presentation of his accompanying song Huizong to play football. The reason why this Gao Li was a lieutenant of the Shuai Palace within half a year was because he was good at playing football and won the favor of emperor Daojun, and the so-called "lifting up Gao Qi's strength and strength, all by his hands and feet will be in power" is also.
Football superstar Lieutenant Gao
Since ancient Chinese writers have used the Keju element in their creations, it is not surprising that the works of contemporary European novelists are related to football. Born in Austria in 1942, Peter Huntek is undoubtedly one of the most famous and controversial contemporary German-speaking writers – as exemplified by his very "politically incorrect" support for Serbia (federal Republic of Yugoslavia) during the Balkan wars of the late 1990s.
As a novelist, Peter Hantek's most important work was His Fear of a Goalkeeper on Penalty Kicks, published in 1970. This is his third novel, which was soon released and was included in the best-seller list by The German authoritative Der Spiegel. In 1972, The Fear of a Goalkeeper on Penalty Was adapted into a low-budget (620,000 Sidmark) film of the same name.
Peter Huntek
The protagonist of the novel, Joseph Bloch, was once a famous football goalkeeper. One day, when Bloch went to work, he found himself fired. While wandering the streets of Vienna, he met a cinema conductor by chance. After spending a night at the latter's house, he killed her. He then traveled to a border city, where Bloch learned from the newspaper that the police had found clues based on coins he had left in the deceased's room and were tracking them down.
On the surface, this seems to be a detective story. However, the narrative perspective of "The Fear of the Goalkeeper when Penalty Shootout" is the murderer from beginning to end, and the novel ultimately lacks the ending of the truth. When Bloch learned that the police were tracking him, instead of trying to escape, he inexplicably went to the football field. At the end of the novel, Bloch explains to others the "fear" of the goalkeeper when faced with a penalty: "The goalkeeper thinks about which corner the opponent wants to kick the ball to", "If he knows the shooter, then he knows which corner he will choose." But the penalty thrower may also estimate the goalkeeper's conjecture. The goalkeeper then considered whether the opponent would shoot into the other corner today. But what if the shooter has the same idea as the goalkeeper and still chooses the corner he is used to shooting? One interpretation suggests that the individual in contemporary society, like Bloch, the murderer hunted by Hantke, has lost the ability to understand and grasp himself, and eventually becomes a complete spectator, even himself. However, the ending of "The Fear of a Goalkeeper on a Penalty" was unexpected: "The shooter suddenly ran. The goalkeeper, dressed in a conspicuous yellow jersey, stood motionless. The free throw shooter shot the ball into his hand "...
It seems to be true
If the relationship between the above novels and football itself is not too big after all, the other "football" novels are even more worthy of the name. The novella "The Refrigerated Football Centre-Forward" by the Italian writer Carlo Mazzoni in the 1980s is one of them.
Unlike ordinary sports novels, which depict the intense scenes on the arena, "The Refrigerated Soccer Center" presents the reader with a completely shocking behind-the-scenes scene: on the eve of the showdown between the two soccer powerhouses, Parro, the famous center of the Furiozo football team, died in the refrigerator of the home of the coach of the rival Apabretti football team, Cocos nus. Pippa, a private detective, feels the case is strange, and he skillfully maneuvers with the police and the press, tracking down clues and finally making the truth clear.
"The Refrigerated Football Center" presents readers with a bizarre Italian football circle: The Apabretti team, in order to weaken the Furiozzo team, offered 300 million lira to buy the rich team's center Parro, but the latter refused; in order to prevent the other side from plotting, two days before the game, both sides had to hide the athletes; The Apabretti coach Cocosnus, who spent money before the game to send beautiful "Krakens", used "smiles" to hook the opposing team members to disintegrate the opponent's combat effectiveness - "Kraken" They secretly put laxatives in the glasses of the opposing athletes, not only depriving them of their best competitive state, but also making them unstable during the game; Parro is obsessed with Tilla and asks to hide in her house on the eve of the final. But he didn't even know that Tierra was a "kraken" sent to "disintegrate" him; his teammate Jimmy, in order to make a personal splash, wanted to participate in The Group A competition and forced center Parro to take sick leave. When this request was rejected, he brutally smashed his head with football boots and finally created a murder... No wonder the author wants to use the mouth of the protagonist of the novel, Pippa, to exclaim: "The moral corruption, deceitfulness, and despicable behavior of the (Italian) football world, I have now learned." In contrast, the "phone door" scandal that broke out in real life in 2006 sensationalized Italian football and forced the relegation of Juventus, a giant club that manipulated the game, to appear much more "gentle".
Coincidentally, Chinese football novels also give people a sense of reality. In 2010, fang Zhao, a well-known racing journalist and football commentator, published his novel Offside, which tells the story of Chinese football from the perspective of a football journalist, claiming to have watched the "darkest decade" of Chinese football. Li Chengpeng said: "After reading it, I was reminded of the 'silly X and great' youth that our group of football journalists experienced together. ”
Fang Zhao's "Offside"
Around the same time, Zhang Yu, who was the chairman of Henan Jianye Football Club from 2005 to 2007, made his novel "Football Gate" more eye-catching. The protagonist of the novel, "Li Ding", navigates the black and white roads with ease and helps the "Big River Team" successfully enter the Chinese Super League. But on the night of the rush, Li Ding had a retreat and decided to resign.
Zhang Yu "Football Gate"
Judging from Li Ding's identity and experience, he and the author Zhang Yu's own experience are indeed quite similar. On the back cover of "Football Gate", "this novel is his recollection and retelling of that life", which is also impressive. Although the author emphasizes that "some experiences in life are sometimes written into the work intentionally or unintentionally, the content of the novel is purely fictional, if there are some real life archetypes, I will not admit it"; such a true and false miscellaneous arrangement in the novel (such as "Sun Shuisheng" to "Wang Suisheng" does leave a deep impression on the reader, and some people call "Football Gate" the "Qingming River Map" in contemporary Chinese football.
"Football on Dog Day"
Regardless of the right and wrong in the football circle, in the writer Xu Kun's pen, the sport of football, often referred to as "peacetime war", has become a symbol of male power society. Her short story "Soccer on Dog Day" (1996) is arguably a profound deconstruction of patriarchal central culture.
Xu Kun
In this novel, when there is no World Cup, in the "small family" of the protagonist Liu Ying and her fiancé Yang Gang, Liu Ying occupies the absolute dominance, and when the World Cup arrives, the home is suddenly filled with football elements, and her original arrangement is driven to the corner. A large number of bachelors poured into the living space that originally belonged to Willow Warbler, and she "had to sit up in a cloak and watch sadly as a group of masculine creatures outside the TV were so excited that they jumped like they were going to hit the wall with their heads, and their carefully arranged small home was damaged like a cat food bowl." The willow warbler's qi did not come out of nowhere. She really didn't understand how watching a broken ball could make such a fuss? Surrounded by male guests, her hostess seems to have become an outsider, as if recreating the male-dominated family space of ancient traditional society.
Soccer on Dog Day
Interestingly, from the beginning of no interest in football, no understanding of the development of the development of their own whole child into a fan, and at the expense of 800 yuan to buy a ticket excitedly sitting in the stands is only a few days of effort. Willow Orioles really "interested" in football is only because of sympathy for the diminutive Diego Maradona who is surrounded by many tall players "like a football on the field" and "kicked, rolled and tripped" in the scramble, "It is in this game that maradona, the "king of the ball", Maradona, finally won the heart of Miss Willow Warbler, the blind girl of the Oriental women's ball. In fact, Willow Watching a ball game on TV is out of frustration, because people all over the world are watching the ball game and she has nowhere to live. Waking up in drowsiness and inadvertently catching a glimpse of Maradona's tragic appearance makes her a "pseudo-fan". As for Shao Li, a young female teacher who lives with Liu Ying, she is a real fake fan: "It's not because I can share a common language with us... There are a bunch of fan enthusiasts over there, if I don't stick to two words, whenever they talk about it, I have to stay and dry. ”
Only when Liu Ying finally sat in the stands of the Beijing Workers' Stadium and shouted for football with tens of thousands of people, she suddenly found that women were always excluded, denigrated and degraded by the male-centered culture, and even the dirty mouths on the court to vent their anger all pointed to women's bodies. When the Score of the Argentine Boca Youth Team led the Beijing Guoan Team 1:0 on the spot, a large area of insulting words (that is, the "Beijing Curse" that has not been extinguished so far, the world-famous one). "Tens of thousands of people's foul mouths converged into a sea of overwhelming noises, using the same language that derogated women's gender, shouting, frantically squeezing over, pressing over, until they were about to crush her down and squash her."
Maradona in Boca Juniors' match against Beijing Guoan (25 July 1996).
At that moment, Willow realized bitterly that all languages were invented by men to attack and insult the second sex, "in fact, they do not need to rehearse in advance, they have been like this since ancient times, since the day when there was a difference between male and female roles. When the humiliated Willow Warbler wanted to fight back against the verbal violence of the male voice with a scolding voice, she could not find the language of the woman herself, and the Willow Warbler searched her stomach and found the only dirty word she knew that had nothing to do with women - "Dog Day". Even so, she could not say: "She felt that her resistance was being exhausted little by little, consumed by the vast, nihilistic iron wall of male power..." At this point, the reader can finally understand the deep meaning behind the title of the novel - a vulgar "dog day" is used to curse the football that represents the patriarchal center culture...