Stämningen stiger i USA dag för dag inför VM, trots att man haft oturen att hamna i dödens grupp. Aldrig tidigare har amerikanska medier varit så taggade inför ett VM och det saknas inte idéer. New Republic bjöd in 11 författare och intellektuella och gav dem i uppdrag att skriva om sina respektive favoritkaraktärer: ”Eleven Writers and Intellectuals on the World Cup’s Most Compelling Characters”.
Det visar sig vara en riktigt bra idé, underhållande. Medverkar gör bland andra Geoff Dyer (Gareth Bale), Aleksandar Hemon (Miralem Pjanić) och Karl Ove Knausgård (Ángel Di María). Så här inleder Knausgård sin motivering:
”The first time I saw Ángel Di María play soccer, I thought, That’s my man. One reason was the name, so loaded with culture and history and yet so otherworldly that it’s like a novel in itself. Another reason was his country, Argentina, which ever since I watched the World Cup on television in 1978 when I was nine has represented for me the land of myth, the republic of dreams, which naturally only intensified when Borges entered my life, and Maradona, of course, the greatest magician of them all. A third reason I took note of Di María, who plays professionally for Real Madrid, was his striking resemblance to Franz Kafka. It is fantastic, isn’t it, Kafka out there on the wing in La Liga?”
Ola Wihlke
”But here is the great thing about writing: Unlike, say, biomedicine or electrical engineering, it has no intrinsic limits. If you are good enough, you can get away with anything. And Dyer, at his best, is outstanding. He is one of our greatest living critics, not of the arts but of life itself, and one of our most original writers—always out there beyond literary Mach 1, breaking the how-things-usually-sound barrier.”
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