Dios es redondo
Juan Villoro
FICTION | 2006 | 256 pages
A brilliant, kaleidoscopic exploration of soccer―and the passion, hopes, rivalries, superstitions, and global solidarity it inspires―from Juan Villoro, “Mexico's top fútbol expert” (NBC News).
On a planet where FIFA has more members than the United Nations and the World Cup is watched by more than three billion people, football is more than just a game. As revered author Juan Villoro argues in this passionate and compulsively readable tribute to the world’s favorite sport, football may be the most effective catalyst for panglobal unity at the time when we need it most. (Following global consensus, Villoro uses “football” rather than “soccer” in the book.)
What was the greatest goal of all time? Why do the Hungarians have a more philosophical sense of defeat than the Mexicans? Do the dead play football? In essays ranging from incisive and irreverent portraits of Maradona, Messi, Ronaldo, Pelé, Zidane, and many more giants of the game to entertaining explorations of left-footedness and the number 10, Juan Villoro dissects the pleasure and pain of football fandom. God Is Round is a book for both fanatics and neophytes who long to feel the delirium of the faithful.
RIGHTS: spanish ANAGRAMA | english RESTLESS BOOKS | polish MICHAL GLINSKI WYDAWNICTWO
“A lyrical exploration of the global game of soccer. In the most prosaic sense, Villoro is a Mexican journalist and professor of literature. But when he writes about soccer, these job titles are insufficient. When tackling the beautiful game, the author is a poet and a critic, a philosopher and a historian, a keen observer and a devoted fan . . . Whether he is producing a “diatribe” aimed at Portugal and Real Madrid narcissist Cristiano Ronaldo or a celebration of Argentina and Barcelona’s Lionel Messi; trying to understand the egomaniacal enigma who is Diego Maradona; or listing his favorite players who wore No. 10 jerseys, Villoro brings some memorable line, some delightful turn of phrase, some inescapable image to every page. Readers will be reminded of a similar stylist, Eduardo Galeano, whose Soccer in Sun and Shadow has always represented the literary apogee of writing about soccer . . . For millions around the world, soccer is not just a game, but rather life itself and, as Villoro ably reveals, very much worth pursuing to the final whistle.”
“In these lyrical essays about the beautiful game ― the one we call soccer and everyone else calls football ― Villoro mines the psychological and emotional depths of what the sport represents, and what it means, and feels like, to be a fan. Many of these pieces center on the way sports can evoke a state of childlike wonder, blending our joy of play with our deepest associations with our parents, our neighborhood, our city…. Strange and soulful as the game itself, Villoro’s pieces will send many readers to Wikipedia to check out key plays and legendary players... [The book] captures something ineffable about what it means to love a team and a sport. This makes Villoro’s scathing takedown of soccer’s governing body even more poignant.”
“The best football writer you’ve never heard of…. Juan Villoro, Mexico’s foremost man of letters, captures the beautiful game to perfection…. Juan Villoro is one of Mexico’s foremost men of letters. A renowned novelist, short-story writer and translator into Spanish of authors as diverse as Graham Greene, Goethe and Truman Capote, Villoro has shown... his Borgesian range of being as at home with D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats as he is with the Hispanic canon. Unlike Borges, who loathed the game, Villoro is also one of the best writers on football in the world. Early on in this remarkable collection of essays, Villoro sets out his stall as a writer of sport…. Villoro is as adept on the vagaries of the game as he is in his psychoanalysis of its players. His essay on Diego Armando Maradona ― with the Tolstoyan title ‘Life, Death, Resurrection and a Little More Besides’ ― is a masterful portrait of the game’s greatest player…. In successfully marrying his love of literature and football, Villoro has demonstrated the first principle of sports writing, or any good writing for that matter.”
BY JUAN VILLORO:
No soy un robot
NONFICTION, 2024
La figura del mundo
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La tierra de la gran promesa
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El vértigo horizontal
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Llamadas de Amsterdam
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¿Hay vida en la tierra?
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Balón dividido
NONFICTION, 2014
Conferencia sobre la lluvia
THEATER, 2014
Arrecife
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El libro salvaje
CHILDREN’S, 2008
Los culpables
SHORT STORIES, 2008
Dios es redondo
NONFICTION, 2006
El testigo
FICTION, 2004
El disparo de Argón
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