But then the phrase ‘Major Literary Power’ also rings pretty hollow. This is where I convince myself that the exercise (proving to be a fiendish work distraction) has an extra added value.

The primary fun to be had with the Literary Match Predictor is the exploration of literatures from countries with which I was previously unfamiliar. That of South Africa in the previous post is a good example and I’m excited at some of the countries to be explored later (North Korea?) But another, more difficult and certainly more subjective seam is to be mined in taking a look at the hegemony some countries seem to hold on the canon – often described as Western but I’m not sure how much use the qualification is; type ‘Eastern canon’ into your search engine and you don’t get a list of books; the 1001 Nights, Tao Te Ching, Kama Sutra or the Art of War are none of them ‘Western’ but would most likely all feature on most people’s lists.

It seems more useful to talk about the canon as a better respected version of 1000 books to read before you die, the writers and works by which other writers and works are influenced, riff on and return to: past, present and future. Under scrutiny it becomes an impermanent beast, a tortured mixture of arrogance and insecurity, wholly subjective and, like Borges’ Library of Babel, bereft of meaning.

Literature abhors a flow chart, and the canon is too often used as one. If one can learn anything from football, (and one can learn many things from football) it’s that on a given day one team always has a good chance against another.

I’ve just realised that I cheated the last time I played this with Uruguay, using seven players! So someone will have to be dropped:

Uruguay:

Manager:

Mario Benedetti; a superb command of style combined with copious life experience and courage. A marvelous example for a team playing against the odds.

Attack:

Comte De Lautréamont; surely has something to prove, rumour has it that he chose to play for Uruguay amid fears that might be squeezed out of the poete maudit spot in the country where he spent most of his life. Surely has something to prove.

Midfield:

Horacio Quiroga, Felisberto Hernández; I love this midfield, you won’t find better, or more complementary exponents of the short pass anywhere, at any time.

Defence:

Eduardo Galeano, Juan Carlos Onetti; a suitably combative defensive pairing, Galeano will surely want to get something over the Europeans, whilst Onetti is one of the great unsung players of the world game.

Goalkeeper:

Carmen Posadas; would seem to have the confidence and experience in the Spanish top leagues to do her team proud.

Bench: Hugo Burel, Juana De Ibarbourou, Jorge Arbeleche, Cristina Peri Rossi; each offers something different although none perhaps possessed of the game-changing qualities that the French are likely to have in droves.

France

Manager

Marcel Proust; not necessarily the most imposing of managers, but it’s fair to say that the game can be divided into a ‘before’ and ‘after’ Monsieur Proust – will his team have a similar effect?

Forward

Arthur Rimbaud; A flighty but brilliant striker, rumours abound that in spite of his tender age he is likely to retire after this world cup.

Midfield

Gustave Flaubert, Alain Robbe-Grillet;  Flaubert is here preferred to Balzac and Zola, the idea being to give Robbe-Grillet’s invention as much space as possible.

Defence

Voltaire, Michel de Montaigne; I like an old fashioned, reduced-nonsense defensive pairing, Jean-Jacques Rousseau might perhaps be regarded as a more natural partner for Voltaire but was in the end deemed a bit flaky. From the French point of view one hopes that they both keep their moments of introspection to a minimum.

Goalkeeper

Michel Foucault; when I mentioned to a friend that I was trying to decide on this team she said very decidedly that Foucault should go in goal. She didn’t explain any further but sometimes one just has to go with their gut instinct. Or someone else’s.

Subs:

Not a single woman so far, so let’s start with Simone De Beauvoir (defence), Colette (attack) and Madame de Lafayette (midfield). Then there’s Baudelaire, Céline and Michel Houellebecq all clamouring for Rimbaud’s forward spot. I especially like the idea of the possibly distatrous partnership between Houellebecq and Rimbaud. Raymond Queneau is an obvious replacement for Robbe Grillet whilst if the midfield needs stiffening, Emile Zola and Honoré de Balzac can be brought in. Rousseau provides further defensive cover. The rules don’t have a limit on the amount of subs that are allowed but I’m beginning to feel that any more and I’m just listing names.

The Match

The early stages are bossed by Uruguay; the team is a coherent unit with a point to prove against France’s overconfidence. The match up between Quiroga and Hernández and Flaubert and Robbe-Grillet is convincingly won by the former pair: it’s as though Flaubert and Robbe-Grillet are speaking entirely different languages. Five minutes after half-time, however, a mistake by Carmen Posadas allows Rimbaud, who had always looked dangerous, a soft goal and after that the result is never in doubt. Lautréamont never looks nearly as threatening as his maudit friend and the substitution of Robbe-Grillet for Emile Zola makes for a solidly impregnable midfield. Uruguay simply don’t have the resources on the bench to counter with an injured Quiroga being replaced by Hugo Burel, and Juana de Ibarbourou coming on for the Lautréamont, to little effect. Colette appears at the end to take advantage of a tiring Uruguay side to bag a brace.

Prediction

Uruguay 0-3 France

South Africa

I was surprised by how difficult I found it to come up with this team – this is in no way meant as a slight on South African literature but is rather admission of my ignorance. Having begun with Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, I blithely assumed that South Africa’s newsworthiness and relative familiarity with the English speaking world would have translated into attention paid to its literature in the literary publications and bookshops where I would normally expect to recruit many of my players. i.e. I arrogantly thought that a ‘well-read’ westerner who reads review pages slightly obsessively in both English and Spanish would have come across plenty enough South African writers to play a silly game like this one. But I was wrong. I didn’t even know that Wilbur Smith was South African.  So, my first team of this world cup is grounded in more ignorance than is ideal – but looking at it another way, offers great potential for exploration.

Manager:

Nadine Gordimer; a brilliant mind with a world class reputation, she seems the perfect person to lead, marshall and provide her team with just the right measures of perspective and worldly wisdom.

Forward:

Wilbur Smith; it’s difficult to imagine Wilbur Smith as anything other than the classic number nine.

Forward:

Niq Mhlongo; an exciting young talent, he provides speed, honesty and a creative flourish to complement Smith’s rather blunt style.

Midfield:

J.M. Coetzee; there are many who consider him to be one of the greatest creative talents playing today. And just as many who find him utterly infuriating. Perhaps it depends on what day you catch him but one wouldn’t find many managers who’d leave him out of their team.

Defence:

Mongane Wally Serote; a wise head with plenty grit and steel, he would hopefully provide stability to counter the moments when Coetzee disappears up a blind alley.

Defence:

Zakes Mda, what’s known today as a ‘modern defender’, an excellent passer and possessed of a marvelous ability to read the game.

Goalkeeper:

Njabulo Ndebele; an utterly dependable character with an impeccable pedigree – exactly what one might want in a goalkeeper.

Subs:

Miriam Tlali (who gets quite a panning on wikipedia, but whose import certainly merits inclusion), Sipho Sepamla, Athol Fugard, Lisa Fugard (the first ever father/daughter team to play in the world cup.)

Mexico
I’m on much more familar ground with Mexico and its quite brilliant literary history, so the task of picking a team was correspondingly easier:

Manager:

Octavio Paz; one of the great men of Mexican letters, he seems exactly the right man to manage this team.

Forward:

Juan Rulfo; deceptively direct and clinical, with an unrivalled ability to ghost past defenders. The only question mark is his lack of match practice.

Midfield:

Carlos Fuentes; a player who in theory has it all. Will run all day and, if given enough possession, is very able to run a game from the midfield.

Midfield:

Sergio Pitol; a marvelously creative player who one would hope would form a productive partnership with Fuentes. has achieved a huge amount in his career and yet is open to accusations of being lightwight.

Defence:

Elena Poniatowska, an honest, extremely hardworking player, the very heartbeat of the team.

Defence:

Ignacio Padilla; recalls some of the great footballing backs of the fifties and sixties.

Goalkeeper:

Sor Juana De la Cruz, prone to lapses of concentration but can be a hugely important player on her day.

Subs:

Guadalupe Nettel, Patricia Laurent, José Emilio Pacheco

The Match:

It seems to me that this would be a game of organization and teamwork against individual brilliance and effort. Looking at the line-up, one would have to say that Gordimer would pull off an incredible feat if she could get her players playing as a cohesive unit. Mexico, in contrast, would seem only to need a guiding hand and the occasional tweak – and the bench is packed with precocious talent and experience if necessary. Nevertheless, South Africa are at home, understand the pitch and the atmosphere better than anyone, one can be sure that each player will give it their all and in Coetzee they have a potential talisman. It’s also possible that Mexico might wilt under the pressure, Rulfo might certainly disappear, but I still see them having too much:

Prediction:

South Africa 1:2 Mexico

Some Fridays from now until June, Monkey’s Wedding will post a prediction of each match from the group stages of the World Cup; pitting fantasy five-a-side teams of writers plus managers and substitutes against each other. The team choices are arbitrary and usually founded on ignorance whilst the ‘matches’ are simply ridiculous. Nevertheless, it’s fun to do and in the process one learns a lot about the literature of dozens of countries.

So, first up: South Africa vs. Mexico…

In the Meantime:

A really excellent post about a reading epiphany (if that’s an adequate description) from This Space; quite disarming.

A very good piece by Boyd Tonkin about some new and re translations of German novels; he’s often a resoundingly lone voice when discussing translated fiction. It’s telling that these are only published because of the brief week’s window provided by there being lots of pretty pictures of oversized dominoes falling on top of each other – imagine the gargantuan effort of translating, editing and marketing an already published book like The Tin-Drum, months of work of up to twenty intelligent, underpayed people coordinated for such a small window. The idea presumably being that ‘Germany’ is on lots of people’s minds so they will be more likely to buy books by ‘German’ writers. One can but hope that next week, when another word is big on the news and there are other pretty pictures, and once the books are moved off the tables back towards the nether-regions of the shop, enough copies have been sold so as not to have put everyone involved off publishing another book in translation for a while.  Also, I didn’t know that Nick Hornby doesn’t read fiction in translation. It’s no big loss to literary criticism (although no serious literary publication should ever let him on its pages until he agrees to stop being…xenophobic or racist? both?) but it’s a surprising position for an Arsenal fan, what would Arsene think?

Now that I’ve started I don’t seem to be able to stop…

An article by Lorrie Moore on Clarice Lispector. As a friend said to me; why do American writers always have to take a survey? More worryingly, and annoyingly, the week after it was published in the NYRB, La Nacion published an article by Tomas Eloy Mártinez basically saying ‘look, the Americans are talking about a South American writer! She’s quite importan, you know.’

And speaking of La Nacion..

Angry bolañomyth bashing by Horacio Castellanos Moya. I was a bit annoyed with myself when I saw that this came out in English because I had read it in the Saturday paper when it came out and it didn’t occur to me that it might be something worth pitching for translation. I didn’t take it particularly seriously for the following reasons: One, in explicitly claiming the writer as a friend Castellanos Moya undermines his argument – he is effectively trying to construct his own myth. Two, it’s too angry; when faced with the conversation in the café you would pointedly ask the waiter to make it a decaf and try to change the subject. Three, for all the ‘North American’  (a bad slip for a Latin American writer as he’s included Mexico and Canada in the mix) angrying-at, the article is in response to an article by a North American (another friend.) Four, as the writer of a recently translated work into English that was exceptionally well-received but perhaps did not sell quite as many copies there is the danger that the grapes in the Castellanos Moya household might be accused of having gone sour. Five, The article came amidst a whole bunch of other articles in La Nacion about the Bolañomyth. And six, of course bo0ks are marketed!

It’s a fun read though.

It looks generally like a very good line-up but I can especially recommend the discussion of Borges and Cortázar on Saturday the 14th.

A few days ago I was walking along the street, pondering what vegetables I would buy for the evening’s dinner, whether or not I should rent a film, and especially the strange fact that no-one had remarked on Lionel Messi’s moment of sublime simplicity in the run up to the goal that sealed Argentina’s passage to the World Cup.

The newspapers were of course filled with Maradona’s absurdist post-match grotesqueries, and if they mentioned Messi’s performance it was only to once more bemoan the fact that he didn’t play as well as he tends to for Barcelona. Whilst I recognise absurdist tendencies of my own in feeling sorry for a much younger man who has already earned more money than I ever will and looks set to square this figure over the course of his career, but I worried nonetheless. To my mind he has not received due credit for the simple intelligence of choosing to square a pass to a Juan Sebastian Veron in space instead of lumping a cross into the six-yard box as almost everyone expected him to do. That Veron (whose standing amongst Argentina fans has actually risen over the past few games, from being booed during Argentina’s first competitive match under Maradona to being seen as a sort of grand old man of the game, even as Messi’s has fallen) scuffed the shot turned out not to matter as the ball came to the six-yard box in an unexpected manner and thus found an Argentinian toe to poke it home. In the same way that a good editor can make a good book into a great one but remain unacclaimed, or even attacked, for doing so (in Argentina, I discover, they acknowledge editorial authorship in the prelims), Messi’s contribution had gone unfairly unremarked.

As my trail of thought reached this point, I was surprised to discover three things: one, that I was thinking out loud, two, that I had reached the my first destination, the greengrocers, and three, that I was being regarded curiously. Greengrocers in Buenos Aires are often just small rooms packed high with boxes of fruits and vegetables. My local one is fairly typical in this way, although I noticed the other day that what I had always taken to be a small room was actually a much larger warehouse or workshop, only given the appearance of smallness by the low entrance and back ‘wall’ of stacked boxes of different varieties of apples and pears. It is run by four people from Bolivia. There is a man and woman in their thirties who may or may not be a couple/married and have the bearing of owners. They are usually only around at midday; the man is always friendly but not very talkative, the woman finds my being English absolutely hilarious. Whenever we meet she points out my nationality to anyone else who happens to be there, especially to children for some reason, and follows this with a great belly laugh whose jollyness is enhanced by the fact that the belly is really quite large. Mostly I am attended by a younger woman (late teens/early twenties?) or a slightly older woman (forties?) The younger woman is there most of the time and is the most talkative of the four, she greets her customers brightly, knows and remembers things about them, listens to the elderly tell their stories and is generally very open and helpful. After a nervous start, the ice between us was properly broken by my asking whether she knew of anyone in the neighbourhood who had recently lost a parrot (another story) although I have to admit that our conversations have not really progressed beyond my telling her how I plan to cook the vegetables, and the fact that the English, like the Bolivians apparently, eat a lot of turnips. The slightly older woman is the most recent arrival to the shop and, at first, seemed to take acute offence at my strange pronunciation, scowling at me in clarifying askance. In recent weeks, however, that scowl has been evolving into a smirk so I am hoping that she, like her colleague/boss, is beginning to find my foreignness more amusing than irritating.

It was she who was now looking at me, scowl forming quickly with no hint of smirk in the offing. Realising that I had very likely uttered the words ‘unfairly unremarked’ to someone who was, perfectly understandably, expecting something more along the lines of ‘Hello!’ or ‘Good day’ followed by something concerning the purchase of vegetables and in Spanish rather than English (if ‘unremarked’ is English), I grew rather flustered. I immediately forgot about fleet-footed millionaires and tried to address the business at hand, eventually filling my 2008 Waitrose bag-for-life with other, plastic, bags filled with assorted greens and half a pound of turnips (my struggle in BA to limit the amount of plastic bags given to me has only been partially successful; re-usable shopping bags are still very much a yuppyish fad here.)

I moved on, so dazed and embarrassed by having been caught talking to myself that I was in the film rental shop, aptly named El Extranjero (The Foreigner) before I had decided whether I wanted to be there or not. I often rent films. This is primarily because Argentinian terrestrial TV is pretty terrible most evenings, consisting mostly of weird variety shows or hysterical soap operas. The variety shows are exclusively fronted by ebullient gentlemen and are only distinguishable from channel to channel by the number of scantily clad models featured and the way they are employed. One on Sunday nights, for instance, has them ten-pin bowling. On weeknights, Channel Thirteen features large casts of dancers clad in tassels and little else who ‘compete’ in a Strictly Come Dancing style competition. This was most disturbing during its children’s season, which was on a level that might well have attracted serious scrutiny from the Metropolitan Police. Channel Eleven runs an interminably long game show, involving lots of silly games with callers-in and studio contestants who can win big prizes like cars and apartments but mostly only win useful ones, like a thousand pesos. Channel Nine has a guy who makes jokes about the gossip of the day, and then follows him with a soap featuring scantily-clad-twenty-five-year-olds-pretending-to-be-catholic-school-girls. Channel Seven, the state broadcaster, sometimes has a good documentary or imports a half-decent TV series but the government has recently nationalised domestic football so it is now often taken up with the games (the nationalization was trumpeted as an investment but so far the advertisements broadcast – on the bottom of the screen during matches – are solely messages from the state. The effect is very much how I imagine watching football was in the Soviet Union. Apparently the company the government set up to manage it all and sell rights has so far run up an $80,000,000 deficit and not yet opened its offices.) Channels Two and Four are mere myths in our house as our aerial doesn’t pick them up. If this all sounds old-fashioned, the effect is accentuated by the fact that a few months ago the self-same aerial started refusing to pick up colour. Cable is widely available, and I will get it one day, but the government has recently brought a controversial law into effect that will supposedly break up some of the media monopolies and mean greater choice of provider. This seems unlikely, but potential disruption and change does not. Anyway, canalla that I am, I’m waiting to see what will happen. So I rent a lot of films. In the interests of fairness towards our aerial I should further mention that our DVD player, perhaps in solidarity, only plays in black and white. So I rent a lot of classic films. The Extranjero also sells new and used books. There are many bookshops in Buenos Aires, (The city’s minister of culture claims that Buenos Aires alone has more bookshops than the whole of Mexico) and this is far from being the biggest or best but the selection is nevertheless usually pretty good, and I always spend a little time browsing . This time, not having decided whether I wanted to rent a film or not, I browsed a little longer than usual and went to an unusual section as I had just read an article in the New Yorker about Michel de Montaigne and wanted to see if they had anything by him. They didn’t. What they did have was a pile of Surs down at the bottom, on the right. I picked up the first one to hand; and stone me if it wasn’t Issue: 235, the 1955 July/August edition containing Jorge Luis Borges’ review of The Dream of Heros by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated below:

Flying in the face of the concept of original sin, it is generally agreed that evil comes from outside: that foreign interests are corrupting (or better said, are on the point of corrupting) the inherent nobility of peoples across the world. Said peoples can however, through a special concession of Providence, count on a certain class of man whose mission it is to preserve this nobility. Paradoxically, far from being the most cultured they are amongst the most obscure and anonymous of men. Woodsmen, shepherds, fishermen and even farmers fulfil this purpose in Europe; they may as individuals be mere nobodies, but somehow within them they harbour the essential virtues of the breed. To criticize them is considered blasphemous; after a defeat it is possible to claim that the generals are traitorous or incompetent but not that the troops have been cowardly. The Jewish myth about the 36 pure men of each generation who justify humanity before God may be a cosmic extension of this idea, given its assertion that these secret pillars of the universe are beggars or vagabonds.

Here, the man possessed of the secret is the gaucho. History might suggest cavalry charges or vast enterprises, but the figure in which the Argentinian finds his symbol is that of the lone, brave man, who chances his life in a knife-fight on the plains or outskirts of the city. Sarmiento, Hernández, Ascabusi, Del Campo, Gutiérrez and Carriego have all helped to construct this myth of the solitary fighter.

In the nineteen-twenties, Güiraldes could still write (and we could still ingenuously read) his Don Segundo Sombra with evident mythological intent. Güiraldes’ work is what is called in Germany a Bildrungsroman, a novel whose central theme is the formation of a character; don Segundo teaches the protagonist about courage and solitude. There may not be a single vacillation to be found in his exceedingly clear book, but its general tone is nostalgic and even elegiac. The essential events have happened before the story begins: don Segundo’s presumed acts of heroism are in the irredeemable past. The fable plays out in the north of the province of Buenos Aires at the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth; farms and gringos had already arrived but Güiraldes ignores them.

El Sueno de los Héroes, by Bioy Casares, offers the latest version of the secular myth. Thirty years and many things have happened since Don Segundo was published, and no-one could honestly be surprised by the fact that our fervour for it has declined. The story is repeated on another stage and with different actors. It is set a long way from Güiraldes’ pampas and Carriego’s criollo neighbourhood; Emilio Gauna is a young man who works in a garage and Sebastián Valerga – a murky but flamboyant character who goes by the name of doctor Valerga – embodies this brutal history, which for him is a beautiful tradition of bravery. It is revealed at the end that this mentor is a sinister man; the revelation surprises and even hurts us, because we identify with Gauna and it confirms the fleeting suspicions that unsettled our reading. Gauna and Valerga get embroiled in a knife-duel in which the master kills the pupil. Then comes the second revelation, even more surprising than the first; we discover that Valerga is abominable, but also that he is brave. The effect is overwhelming. Bioy has, instinctively, saved the myth. What would happen if, on the final page of the Quijote, don Quijote were felled by the lance of a genuine Paladin, in the magical kingdom of Bretaña or on the remote beaches of Ariosto?

Much has and will be written about this admirable novel; about the casual excellence of its oral style, its oneiric plot, its skilled use of the carnival to precipitate the fantastic. I have preferred to highlight its symbolic value. It is enough to suspect that we Argentinians are only capable of conceiving a single story; the bitter and lucid version created by Adolfo Bioy Casares corresponds tragically well to the years we are currently living.’ JORGE LUIS BORGES

And then Nic from Eve’s Alexandria enjoys Ficciones. I very much enjoyed reading how much fun he found the stories, and also the way he slips into nicely perceptive pointmaking.

Hooray!

Ooh, and a very good piece by Stuart from Booklit on the Nobel Prize.

Last (Northern Hemisphere) summer, I amused myself after work by inventing a literary match predictor for the European championship. Incredibly, on the only two occasions it was properly employed, it kind of worked. I remembered it as I was contemplating the extraordinary melodrama of Argentina’s recent win over Peru; an inept, tragic performance redeemed, in rain so hard that one couldn’t see from one side of the pitch to the other (it also flooded my balcony), by a large, many-tattooed striker whose previous claim to fame was once having missed three penalties in a single game, (with this goal he was off-side). Borges was not at all a football fan, its closest mention in Borges being a remark sometime in the sixties on the strange use of the word selección to describe the national team. Bioy Casares was more sporty, but hardly a fanatico. I’m sure that they would both have deplored the melodrama, the astounding incompetence of men on gargantuan salaries, the populism, etc.  Although heroism in the pouring rain, by a man named Palermo might just have appealed…

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to bring the predictor back for the last round of World Cup Qualifiers. So this is how it works: Five-a-side, plus subsitutes and a manager, all qualified writers living, dead etc.

The wealth of talent available to the Argentina team is mind-boggling, but Uruguay have some world-class players too. The trick with both would be to get the balance right. Here we go…

Argentina

Manager: Jorge Luis Borges

Attack:

Manuel Puig

Midfield:

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Ricardo Piglia

Defence:

Juan José Saer, Roberto Arlt

Goalkeeper:

Julio Cortázar

Substitutes:

Rodolfo Walsh, Haroldo Conti, César Aira, Alejandra Pizarnik, Alan Pauls (no English wikipedia entry)

Gameplan: Puig plays as an unconventional striker with Ocampo playing as enganche just off him – their complementary but unpredictable styles should in theory have all that it takes to bamboozle the defence. One would assume that Ocampo has an excellent understanding with Bioy Casares, who would play as the classic English style, box-to-box midfielder with the potential to contribute goals. Piglia is the holding midfielder; his all-round understanding of the game being well-suited to the role. At the back, Arlt and Saer should be pretty solid;  both have the experience and understanding but also a willingness the get stuck in when it counts. Cortázar is a thinking ‘keeper, most of his playing career having been spent in France, he’s used to the international hurly-burly. The subs’ bench could be thirty times as long. Walsh can consider himself unfortunate that he didn’t get a starting role but should Argentina need to dig deep and fight he’ll be on in a flash. Conti I see as the classically dependable utility-man; he won’t let you down. Aira and Pizarnik are there for their speed and unpredictability – they will both offer something different for ten minutes. Pauls is another unlucky one; he could potentially run the midfield but his time will come.

Uruguay:

Manager:

Mario Benedetti

Attack:

Comte De Lautréamont

Midfield:

Juan Carlos Onetti, Horacio Quiroga, Felisberto Hernández

Defence:

Eduardo Galeano, Cristina Peri Rossi

Goalkeeper:

Carmen Posadas

Bench: Hugo Burel, Juana De Ibarbourou, Jorge Arbeleche

Gameplan: A shock selection (he qualifies by birth), the Comte de Lautréamont has bags of goals and a reputation to match. But will he last the course? A creative engine of Hernández (much admired by Borges) and Quiroga (not so much – point to prove?), with Onetti screening is absolutely world class. Eduardo Galeano has proven himself defending his team’s interests at the highest level whilst Cristina Peri Rossi once beat Maradona. Carmen Posadas is a safe pair of hands, with lots of overseas experience. I don’t know much about the subs’ bench except that Hugo Burel plays for Lengua de Trapo, a decent recommendation in itself, and the other two come highly rated.

The Match: On paper Argentina should have too much for Uruguay. But – although Borges’ talents as a player were never in doubt, his man-management is pretty questionable, could he organize such a talented but volatile dressing room? He has already caused not a little controversy by leaving out Ernesto Sabato all together. Benedetti seems better suited for the job, his stellar midfield is far more settled, and in Galeano he has a real scrapper. If Uruguay get off to a good start they’ll cause serious consternation.

Prediction: A tight match, but Argentina should have enough, possibly coming off the bench, by the end to win 2-1.

***

I got the margin right! And later the manager came out with kind of comments that, were there a Nobel Prize for football, would very likely guarantee that he would never receive it.

Of course, the nationality of a writer shouldn’t really come into it. Neither should their politics.

But Europe provides the closest thing there is to a centre of world literature. France, Germany and many other European countries have a long tradition of importing and translating literature from all across the world – which logically means that European readers (who might then become writers) have excellent access to ‘worldly’ points of view which in turn means that they are far more likely to produce literature of worldly importance.

”Descriptions of specious crimes, impracticable incests, in short; events that might 0nly have happened once in thousands of years of History are called realism. In contrast, if we come up with a humble invisible man, we’re immediately sent deep into fantasy literature.’

Borges wasn’t a big fan of literary competitions. This is probably because early in his career he didn’t win a bunch that he should have (beaten, isn’t it always the way, by eventual nobodies) and later because he had to judge them. (Although he owed the happiest period of his life to a prize – the Formentor, which he won along with Samuel Beckett.) In Borges he is often to be found arguing that the prizes for which he is on the judging committee are far too generous, on one occasion saying the value, which others had proposed might be doubled, should be cut in half. Both he and Bioy spent a lot of their time reading the mediocre  submissions to various prizes – often having to end an evening with a good piece of writing to get the bad taste out of their mouths.

There is also a marvelous occasion that finds them at the prize-giving, hoping to god that they haven’t awarded the prize to someone ghastly (to their great relief they found that they didn’t.) [with a hung head] I couldn’t find that entry.

This, of course, is a result of the entries to the prize having been submitted anonymously. Surely this would be the only really fair way to administer a purely literary prize? I would argue that the judges would need to be anonymous too, at least until after the event. Of course, The Booker is not a purely literary prize, it’s a marketing exercise (an effective one) which needs big names revealed on long and shortlists a long time in advance (so that bookshops can order and publishers can print – I once attended a surreal meeting which saw representatives from two large publishers’ sales departments complaining loudly about the difficulty of getting 100,000 books printed – ‘ a couple of days would help’), one or two ‘unknowns’ i.e. newish writers who have been aggressively promoted as bright young things for about six months, and yes, lots of ‘controversy’. Last year, conversely, the ‘controversy’ was about a ‘genre’ novel having been included.

The genre argument is, of course, a bit of a red herring. But, to delve into this one: Mr Stanley Robinson seems to shoot himself in the foot in slamming historical fiction in the same breath as he complains of science fiction being slammed a (I suspect he is thinking of elven fiction – lyrical realism – whatever the genre, which can always stand a good slamming.) And the reaction of the judges is not what it might be – shifting the blame onto what the publishers submit is disingenuous; the judges are able to call in any book they like so long as it meets the criteria. Had a lack of science fiction offerings been noticed, it would have been remedied. Publishers, limited to the number of titles each imprint can offer (3 I think), will of course only submit books they think have a chance of winning. Presumably more thrillers appeared this year than last, for example. But then the controversy wouldn’t be any good without soundbites.

I wonder whether there isn’t a University literature (or marketing) department somewhere with enough funding to set up an experiment where the same texts were submitted anonymously…it would just end up being another prize wouldn’t it? But worth doing!