An Anthology of Latin American Football Fiction
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Dickinson College Dickinson Scholar Faculty and Staff Publications By Year Faculty and Staff Publications 2016 Idols and Underdogs: An Anthology of Latin American Football Fiction Shawn Stein Dickinson College Nicolás Campisi George Shivers Richard McGehee Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.dickinson.edu/faculty_publications Part of the Fiction Commons, Latin American Languages and Societies Commons, and the Sports Studies Commons Recommended Citation Stein, Shawn, and Nicolás Campisi, eds. Idols and Underdogs: An Anthology of Latin American Football Fiction. Translated by George Shivers, Shawn Stein, and Richard McGehee. Glasgow: Freight Books, 2016. This article is brought to you for free and open access by Dickinson Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AN ANTHOLOGY OF AN ANTHOLOGY OF LATIN AMERICAN FOOTBALL FICTION LATIN AMERICAN FOOTBALL FICTION Eleven stories, one from each country in the South American World Cup qualifying group, plus Mexico (following the precedent set by the Copa América). Idols and Underdogs includes some of the most prestigious names in Latin American literature. A hymn to the jogo bonito, these short stories demonstrate, in stark contrast to its European counterpart, just how connected Latin American football is to its roots in the backstreets, barrios and favelas. Including Juan Villoro (Mexico), Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), Ricardo Silva Romero (Colombia), Sérgio Sant’Anna (Brazil), Sergio Galarza (Peru), Selva Almada (Argentina), Carlos Abin (Uruguay), Roberto Fuentes (Chile), Miguel Hidalgo Prince (Venezuela), José Hidalgo Pallares (Ecuador), and Javier Viveros (Paraguay), this is a who’s who of Latin American fiction. Also contains author interviews, Edited by SHAWN STEIN and NICOLÁS CAMPISI charting personal views on football and its intersections with politics, literature, and wider culture. Shawn Stein Stein Shawn Idols and Underdogs is an English translation of Por amor a la pelota: Campisi Nicolás once cracks de la ficción futbolera and Fiction/Sport ISBN: 978-1-910449-84-4 £9.99 freightbooks.co.uk Idols and Underdogs An Anthology of Latin American Football Fiction 14160 Idols and Underdogs Text Artwork .indd 1 20/04/2016 12:44 First published in 2016 Freight Books 49–53 Virginia Street Glasgow, G1 1TS www.freightbooks.co.uk Copyright © Shawn Stein, Nicolás Campisi, and all individual contributors listed within 2016 The moral rights of the contributors listed within to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or by licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. English edition of Por amor a la pelota: Once cracks de la ficción futbolera (Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2014) A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-910449-84-4 eISBN 978-1-910449-85-1 Typeset by Freight in Plantin Printed and bound by Bell and Bain, Glasgow 14160 Idols and Underdogs Text Artwork .indd 2 20/04/2016 12:44 Idols and Underdogs An Anthology of Latin American Football Fiction Edited by Shawn Stein and Nicolás Campisi Translated by George Shivers, Shawn Stein and Richard McGehee 14160 Idols and Underdogs Text Artwork .indd 3 20/04/2016 12:44 Shawn Stein is from the state of Colorado in the United States, and earned his PhD from the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is currently an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, USA, where he teaches Latin American letters with a focus on literary and cultural studies. Stein’s scholarship includes work on narrative satire, film and football fiction. He is the founder of a community engagement organisation called the Día de Fútbol (Day of Football). Although he does not have a pledged allegiance to any particular team, he is an ardent fan of the game. Nicolás Campisi was born in Santa Rosa, La Pampa, Argentina. He holds a B.A. in Hispanic Studies and Art History from Washington College in Maryland, USA. His academic interests include 20th and 21st Century Southern Cone narratives, avant-garde poetics, travel literature, trauma and memory studies, and world literature. He is a fan of Club Atlético River Plate in Argentina. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA. 14160 Idols and Underdogs Text Artwork .indd 5 20/04/2016 12:44 14160 Idols and Underdogs Text Artwork .indd 6 20/04/2016 12:44 Table of contents Foreword Rodge Glass 1 Prologue Shawn Stein and Nicolás Campisi 7 Argentina Selva Almada 15 Bolivia Edmundo Paz Soldán 33 Brazil Sérgio Sant’Anna 51 Chile Roberto Fuentes 87 Colombia Ricardo Silva Romero 107 Ecuador José Hidalgo Pallares 133 Mexico Juan Villoro 151 Paraguay Javier Viveros 181 Peru Sergio Galarza 211 Uruguay Carlos Abin 231 Venezuela Miguel Hidalgo Prince 273 14160 Idols and Underdogs Text Artwork .indd 7 20/04/2016 12:44 Foreword Football fans consume vast amounts of non-fiction. Every day there’s a new twist to the ongoing drama of the game – in fact, in this age of minute-by-minute reports and the ever-ready ‘refresh’ button, the idea of daily team news seems quaintly old-fashioned. To take one example: in the few hours after Manchester United’s Champions League match finished last night, my phone flashed up six newspaper articles, all written during and/or after the game, all edited, checked and online before I went to bed. There was: 1) a straight match report detailing the bald facts of who did what, when; 2) a more nuanced report focusing on the contribution of one star player; 3) another focusing on a recently side-lined squad player now getting his chance; 4) a piece on tactics; 5) a broader view segueing into a thought piece on how the ‘journey’ of the manager at the club is playing out; and then 6) a humour article making fun of it all. (I fell asleep reading number six.) The appetite for football-related writing is massive. It’s worldwide. And it demands commentary instantly. This we know. But there’s now evidence that fans are also increasingly open to fiction about football. That makes sense. After all, what is a transfer rumour if not speculation, and what is speculation if not making things up? Though it’s gone largely unnoticed, fiction has been, for many years, a crucial part of the media’s football soap opera. Imagination has been central to telling the story, whatever the story is that day. This has usually been labelled ‘journalism’, though it doesn’t always need to be, and I feel strongly that fiction can make a contribution that the on-demand world can’t. It can tell us something more meaningful than straightforward stats. That’s why I’m interested in it – because football is a reflection. Which means it’s a different game in Ecuador, in Uruguay, in 1 14160 Idols and Underdogs Text Artwork .indd 9 20/04/2016 12:44 Peru. When this book was sent to me by Adrian at Freight, with the email header ‘Your kind of thing?’, he already knew it was. In the UK, football fiction is relatively new, but there are examples of the form which have blown apart the idea that somehow sport is sacred, and writers are not allowed to fictionalise it. Arguably, the leader for this has been David Peace, the first literary writer I came across who was brave enough to break apart the conventional historical story in order to get to a kind of deeper truth. This book was The Damned United (2006), a novel which was nothing less than a revelation for me, a weaving together of two stories involving Brian Clough during his successful spell managing Derby County in the 1970s, and disastrous one managing Leeds. Peace inhabited Clough’s voice. He imagined himself into dressing rooms during key events, but more than that, did all those things that literary fiction does at its best – revealing a world readers wouldn’t usually have access to, and doing it with character, detail, charm, subtlety. Much of which is absent in the hectic now-now-now of contemporary football reporting, especially within the sanitised environs of clubs preoccupied with ‘developing our brand’. Though on one level The Damned United was a novel about Brian Clough’s 44-day period leading a team he despised, it fascinated me even though I have no interest in Leeds United. How? Because it was written with the rhythms and tics of Clough’s DNA. And because, like all good football fiction, it wasn’t really about football at all. It was about male relationships, about a fast-disappearing England, about a man cursed and blessed. Which is deeper, broader, more intriguing, than the bald facts. I thought of Peace when reading Selva Almada’s “Team Spirit”, a story which examines the impact the game has on Argentinian women whose men are obsessed by sport. This is the contribution well-written fiction makes. To look off 2 14160 Idols and Underdogs Text Artwork .indd 10 20/04/2016 12:44 the field as well as on it.