March 2020: Brazil and the Netherlands

Read: The Eternal Son by Cristovao Tezza (Brazil), A Letter for the King  by Tonke Dragt (Netherlands)

When I hear the word ‘Brazil,’ images of beautiful, cavaliering, elegant football spring immediately to mind. Their yellow shirts mirror the sunny joy that their football brings me and whenever a World Cup comes around, their fixtures are ones that I make sure I’m on the sofa for and however dull the actual match, I never lose the anticipation of seeing them again. When I asked my Brazilian friend, Lynn, for a book recommendation, subconsciously, I think I expected the novel to mirror the excitement of its football team as if Brazilian life is perpetually exciting and joyous.

Cristavao Tezza’s autobiographical novel had nothing of the atmosphere that I have just described, but it is an important lesson to keep learning: to not live as if nonsensical stereotypes are actually all there is. I’ve made the mistake before. At university, I took a course in African literature, expecting stories of skirmishes with lions and befriending elephants whereas what I got (from some of the books) was such unbearable suffering that I found it difficult to continue reading. 

Tezza’s novel tells the story of his life and his relationship with his son Felipe who has Down Syndrome. What is remarkable about this book is its unflinching honesty. Tezza chooses the third-person narrative position to tell the story and this allows him to be brutal in constructing his own character flaws as he comes to terms with how life has turned out for him. There are many significant challenges that father and son face, but it was the ending to the novel that left me with a sense of hope which had been absent for much of the book and the thing that gave them that hope was football - my Brazilian point of reference. Felipe had lived in the eternal present, struggling with concepts such as days of the week, but football provided, as Tezza puts it, “the millimetric abstraction between now and later.” It also gave Felipe a literacy he had not before acquired, social opportunities to interact on the simple level that fans do and gave him one of the first understandable metaphors of his life: “They’re going to eat our dust!” although he followed it up by miming eating dust. 

I have two sons and I recognise that football can give us something special as well. Few hobbies and interests transcend the ageing process and can be shared for life, but football is one of those. I love taking my boys to the football and in the row in front of us at Brighton and Hove Albion’s Amex Stadium, my friend sits with his adult offspring and I can see the togetherness and community that it offers is so, so special. It’s obviously (although some may disagree) not the most important thing in life, but gives an opportunity to be together, to share something, to rub shoulders as human beings and I think men need that. I’m sure women to do, but they seem more equipped to cope without having eleven men carrying their hopes for ninety minutes every Saturday.

The book made me think of one of the most recognised fans of my team: the Mighty Fin. Fin has something called Mowat-Wilson Syndrome. I’m no expert on this condition, but it’s fair to say that it presents Fin with many challenges. I’ve met Paul and Fin once, on a wander up to the stadium. Paul is a friend of a friend and we had a chat as we strolled up the path. I sent Paul a message after reading the book, telling him about how it made me think of him and asked him if he’d be happy to share what football has given him and Fin and the next day, he sent me a detailed email, full of his love for his son, his football club and the adventures it has brought them. 

Bringing Fin to a game was something Paul had felt nervous about. Fin is very sensitive to loud noises and football fans like to roar their encouragement and scream their disapproval of the referee throughout, but Paul took the risk and took him to Villa Park to see Brighton play for Fin’s debut. Before the game, two Brighton players came over to say hello, getting the day off to a special start, and despite the fact that he stuck his fingers in his ears for the first seventy-five minutes, he loved it. The appetite for live football was birthed in both father and son and Paul promised that they’d watch Brighton as often as they could even though a trip to Brighton is a 600-mile round trip.

Paul talks warmly of the long car journey listening to Talk Sport, the stop-off to pick up a sausage bap and that magic moment when Brighton’s Stadium appears on the horizon and Fin’s excitement and what he knows is to come bubbles over with cries of “Hoot-hall, hoot-hall!” Paul had always enjoyed watching football with his friends, but he describes going with Fin as having a special quality, witnessing his son soaking up the atmosphere and enjoying the camaraderie of the other fans who love to throw Fin a high five. 

I’m grateful that Paul was happy to share his thoughts with me. Cristavao Tezza describes himself and Felipe sitting down to watch football as “make-believe warriors” and that phrase feels true of Paul and Fin as well as they make their way from Wales to the South Coast: two fathers on an adventure with their sons, suspending the trials of daily life and seeing whether their blokes can kick the ball into the back of net more times than the other blokes.

The second book I read this month came from the Netherlands and this was the first of the international books that I read with my boys. I have twin boys who are now eleven years old and pretty much from birth, I have sat most evenings and read a book to them. It feels special that we’ve shared so many adventures. There have been some lovely moments. When reading them Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the repetitive failure of Charlie not finding a Golden Ticket had built up such a sense of disappointment in them that when Charlie finally found a ticket, my boys leapt from the sofa and celebrated wildly at his victory. Other books have provided conversations that would have been unlikely otherwise. The Hunger Games got us talking about politics, manipulation and how the world works; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe got us talking about Jesus, faith and sacrifice and Stinkbomb & Ketchup-Face and the Badness of Badgers got us laughing. 

My Dutch friend, Aafje, recommended for me a book that she read when she was about the same age as my boys, A Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt. It felt special to read something that had such a resonance that decades later, it still shone distinctly. I remember for myself that there were places that I would go in my dreams that had been birthed in books. I was a regular in Narnia, Sherwood Forest and Indian jungles in my imagination as a boy and A Letter for the King is a book like that, one that presents a world, fertile for a child’s imagination. This world was one of knights, kingdoms, castles, missions and a clear distinction between good and evil. Of the things that Aafje remembers fondly, she describes the sense of honour and the victory of the underdog. I think the underdog makes us all feel like heroism is attainable for us. The author spent time as a child in the Japanese Prisoner of War camp, Tjideng, during the Second World War and it was there, writing on used bits of paper and toilet rolls that she found her voice and I guess, her triumph in living to tell the tale was part of what fuelled her to write about young underdogs overcoming challenges as her main character, Tiuri, son of Tiuri, does. Aafje almost said that she was surprised to find out that the author was female. I can see how she would feel that the book feels stereotypically male, but I like the fact that as a child, Aafje got this whiff of adventure from the book and that the adventure was not something owned exclusively by men, but that the thrill of adventure she felt when reading was part of her identity, something she could share with Dragt.

On completion of the book, I asked my boys what they thought of it. I was hoping for something poignant and meaningful that I could include, but they simply said they liked it and that they’d like to read the next one which is a decent enough, if not effusive, recommendation.