Home and Away

Starred review from December 5, 2016
Reviewed by Seth Saterlee Friends since meeting in a casual soccer game, novelist, poet, and translator Ekelund (Malmo Dockers, Report!) and bestselling novelist Knausgaard (My Struggle) have very different opinions about how the beautiful game should be played. Knausgaard believes in “Protestant football,” where “efficiency, graft, pain, and suffering” win games. Ekelund prefers the “Dionysian” jogo bonito style of Brazil. In this fantastic book of correspondence covering the 2014 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, the two writers send reports back and forth (sometimes several times a day) analyzing and contextualizing the ups and downs of the sensational tournament, but also spinning off on tangents about the events of their daily lives, the state of global politics, and the relationship between writing and soccer; nothing is off the table in their free-wheeling, deeply personal letters.
Knausgaard watches the tournament on TV from Sweden between speaking commitments and trips to the beach with his four children. Ekelund is on the scene in Rio, taking the pulse of his Brazilian friends, exploring the streets, and playing the odd game of pick-up. Although soccer fans will get the most out of these lengthy discussions on players and tactics, readers with just a passing interest in the sport will be enlightened by their thorough exploration of how soccer has evolved over the years. And with Knausgaard and Ekelund situating themselves on opposite poles of soccer philosophy—“life-denying,” negative soccer versus the energetic, positive jogo bonito—tension builds as the tournament moves through its most dramatic moments: Van Persie’s flying header, the Suarez bite, Brazil’s 7–1 humiliation at the hands of the Germans. Thirsting for life but feeling he has “missed the bus” on becoming a bon vivant, Knausgaard relishes the physical, tactical games in which neither team is willing to give an inch. Ekelund would rather see an open game, ebbing and flowing in its pace and pressure.
Filled with exquisite, solemn passages about the stark Scandinavian landscape and the quiet life of caring for children, Knausgaard’s letters are the weightier of the two, constantly bringing the conversation back to geopolitical and metaphysical questions—the state of the individual in modern society, the dissolution of the collective, the nature of memory. Ekelund is quick to provide the antidote, with tales of working-class people on the outskirts of Rio, conversations with bartenders and metal workers about the recent surge of middle-class wealth. “Once again,” Knausgaard writes, “I felt hot cheeks of shame because when you describe your world it is as if you are correcting mine.”
As the book progresses, readers can see Knausgaard and Ekelund learning from each other, realizing new desires and prejudices, reevaluating former positions, repositioning themselves. The discourse is so open, so productive and thoughtful, that when readers reach the final letter, from Ekelund, sadness takes over; we can’t read Knausgaard’s reply. Hopefully they’ll still be corresponding in 2018.

November 1, 2016
An epistolary exploration of soccer and life.In 2014, the highly regarded Scandinavian writers Knausgaard (My Struggle: Book Five, 2016, etc.) and Ekelund exchanged letters during the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. This book is the result of their exchanges. (It seems clear that they planned to produce a book based on their correspondence). Ekelund was in Brazil, an almost home-away-from-home for him, while Knausgaard was home, mostly in his adopted Sweden. Both are acclaimed writers in their own region, with growing reputations internationally, especially Knausgaard and his bestselling autobiographical My Struggle novels. Both love soccer, and thus the sport and especially the World Cup provide the connecting line for these insightful and discursive letters that reflect not only on o jogo bonito but also on seemingly everything else under the sun. From gender politics to family, food to writing, love and loss, tragedy and triumph, thoughts of suicide and feelings of ecstasy, and from the mundane aspects of daily life to the things that make life worth living (sometimes these are one and the same), the authors cover vast swaths of the human experience while always returning to their differing perspectives on the soccer they witnessed in 2014. For readers willing to accept these letters on their own terms and go with the sometimes stream-of-consciousness ramblings of two men deeply committed to the writer's art, the rewards are great. However, there may not be enough soccer for fans expecting a work focusing on the sport, and what strikes some readers as joyful perambulations with two thoughtful interlocutors may strike others as self-indulgent and meandering. But for those for whom these letters resonate, the effect is powerful and cascading, a pleasing waterfall of imagery and intellect. Though the correspondence is mostly about soccer, it is also about so much more.

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November 15, 2016
The premise is simple: Knausgaard, Norwegian author of the monumental hexalogy Min Kamp ( My Struggle ), and Ekelund, a Swedish novelist, poet, playwright, and filmmaker, exchange letters about the 2014 World Cup in Brazil as it happens. Anyone familiar with Knausgaard's work won't be surprised that they wring 400 pages out of a 32-day tournamentbut what thought-provoking and delightful pages they are! The games themselves are merely starting points for intimate, philosophical meanderings that encompass everything from the role of sports in life to class, nationalism, and the fine line separating humans from apes. The men are a study in contrasts: Knausgaard, a self-avowed life-denier, watches the games on TV (sometimes falling asleep mid-match) in a small Swedish village where he juggles the demands of his writing career with fatherhood. Ekelund, 15 years his senior, immerses himself in Rio de Janeiro, where he plays soccer, swims in the ocean, and watches games with locals. Both writers' openness to each other and to big ideas, despite their admitted shortcomings as sports analysts, makes this a wonderfully fascinating read that should give any thoughtful sports fan pen-pal envy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)