Fever Pitch - Softcover
Synopsis
“Whether you are interested in football or not, this is tears-running-down-your-face funny, read-bits-out-loud-to-complete-strangers funny, but also highly perceptive and honest about Hornby’s obsession and the state of the game.” —GQ
A brilliant memoir from the beloved, bestselling author of Dickens and Prince, Funny Girl, and High Fidelity.
In America, it is soccer. But in Great Britain, it is the real football. No pads, no prayers, no prisoners. And that’s before the players even take the field.
Nick Hornby has been a football fan since the moment he was conceived. Call it predestiny. Or call it preschool. Fever Pitch is his tribute to a lifelong obsession. Part autobiography, part comedy, part incisive analysis of insanity, Hornby’s award-winning memoir captures the fever pitch of fandom—its agony and ecstasy, its community, its defining role in thousands of young men’s coming-of-age stories. Fever Pitch is one for the home team. But above all, it is one for everyone who knows what it really means to have a losing season.
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About the Author
Nick Hornby is the author of seven internationally bestselling novels (Funny Girl, High Fidelity, About a Boy, How to be Good, A Long Way Down, Slam and Juliet, Naked) and several works of non-fiction including Fever Pitch, Songbook and Ten Years In The Tub. He has written screenplay adaptions of Lynn Barber’s An Education, nominated for an Academy Award, Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn. He lives in London.
Reviews
*Starred Review* Hornby’s current ubiquity—he edits anthologies, his books have become movies, his YA novel was well received, and he even recently became a pop lyricist—makes it hard to remember the freshness of his voice when we first heard it. Given that this, his first book, was about his obsessive relationship with the north London soccer team, Arsenal, many Americans didn’t hear that voice until High Fidelity (1995), a novel that riffed on the broader subject of favorite bands and songs. In soccer-mad England, Fever Pitch (published in the UK in 1992) was a career-maker. Each chapter includes a title, a game, and a date (e.g., “Boys and Girls: Arsenal v. Leicester City, 2.4.77”). And, to a degree, each chapter follows a formula. Hornby relates some aspect of his life (in this case, his first serious relationship) and how it relates to a particular game (she was the first girlfriend who came to the stadium with him). But if the format is formulaic, the execution is anything but. In the above chapter, Hornby recalls the way his girlfriend’s room showed evidence of “knowledge gleaned from somewhere outside the A-level syllabus” while lamenting that young men “were defined only by the number and extent of our interests.” He concludes that, although he may have lacked depth compared to her, at least his fandom gave him “a couple of features other than a nose, two eyes, and a mouth.” Sometimes the shortness of the chapters is frustrating, like a referee blowing the whistle for halftime when your team is moving the ball toward the goal, but the too-frequent stops are redeemed by Hornby’s seemingly inexhaustible turns of phrase. He examines his life from adolescence to adulthood—the transition that informs nearly all of his work since—with uncommon insight, wit, humility, and grace. He enumerates his own failings with as much zeal as those of the Football Association, always returning to the central question of what it means to be a fan. It says a great deal about the complexity and intelligence of this book that Hornby can simultaneously mock his own arrested development while finding joy and even meaning in the attachment to a team that doesn’t know he exists. (As was then the case; they certainly do know now.) Even though the first U.S. edition of Fever Pitch was timed to coincide with our hosting of the World Cup, the book didn’t gain as much traction as it might have. For many new fans, interest in the sport lasted only until the U.S. team’s elimination at the hands of Brazil. But 16 years later, the book has become something of a cult favorite. Soccer is bigger now, and the terminology and context are more familiar to U.S. readers. But the book’s larger themes are as universal as ever. --Keir Graff
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