Book review: Football by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Like Albert Camus, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, is a philosopher and a novelist, and also like Camus, Toussaint shares a life-long love of soccer. Football should not be mistaken as a high-brow equivalent of Fever Pitch: Toussaint is no Nick Hornby, writes Tom Mooney.

The author of Fever Pitch, a love letter to Arsenal and particularly Highbury, wouldn’t dream of lending his name to the following sentence by Toussaint describing the World Cup in Japan, at which Ireland were famously eclipsed by an emerging Spain from the penalty spot.

“I had a feeling that football and Japan, even though they are contradictory — tumult and tranquillity, fire and water — were merging together to give birth to a new element, an unknown and delicious alliance that as yet had no name.”