Today's
Boston Globe contains an article by Mark Feeney on soccer on page and screen.
The soccer fan's bible is Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. (Yes, through the miracle of 
Hollywood transformation it inspired last year's Red Sox movie.) But the foremost author with a soccer lineage is no less a figure than Vladimir Nabokov , who has a soccer match figure in his novel Glory, and a soccer ball in his novel Pnin. Nabokov came by his soccer the hard way: As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he played goalie for his Trinity College team.
"I was crazy about goal keeping," he wrote in his memoirs, Speak, Memory. The goalie, he declared, "is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender." He is also an ideal existential symbol, a fact Peter Handke exploited in his novel The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which Wim Wenders made into a film.
To read the entire article, click
here.
To read an excerpt from
Fever Pitch, click
here.
--Marshal Zeringue
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