Saturday,
October 27, 2007
"Playing for Pizza" Makes
Reviewer an Italian Devotee, but No Football Fan
The
ANNOTICO Report
This
Reviewer from Malaysia, after having read Grisham's latest book, "Playing
for Pizza" finds that she has learned two things: FIRST, Italy
is the place to go to before she dies, and, SECOND,
American football is a difficult game to read about.
But
then maybe it's a Chick thing ?? :)
Just Forget
the Football
A legal thriller master writes about playing football but wins our reviewer over with everything else but football.
PLAYING FOR
PIZZA
By John Grisham Publisher: Doubleday;
258 pages (ISBN: 978-0385525008)
BEFORE picking up
Playing for Pizza, I had only read two of John Grisham's non-legal
novels, A Painted House and Skipping Christmas. I must confess that,
although the books were good, I had wished at least 70 times that I'd wake up
to find out that he hadn't written them at all.
Now, don't get me
wrong, Grisham is quite talented at switching from high-octane legal thriller
vein to more mundane mode and writing interestingly about stuff we take for
granted.
But reading a
Grisham minus the due process drama is like eating non-fat chocolate cake -
it's chocolate but not real chocolate, and you'll never feel the same
satisfaction in the end. Know what I mean?
So, obviously, I
approached Playing for Pizza which much
trepidation. But I was asked to review it, so I pushed aside my initial
apprehension and tried the novel.
First of all,
it's an easy book to read, as it took me fewer than eight hours and only two
"You're going to go blind if you keep reading like that" comments
from my mother to finish it.
And when I
finally had, I'd learned two things: first,
(Thanks to Astro's ESPN and the like, you probably realise,
of course, I'm not talking about the "football" that most Malaysians
mean when that word is used - the Americans, being Americans, just had
to be different and develop their own version that involves carrying the
ball....)
The story
revolves around NFL (National Football League) Hall-of-Shame inductee Rick
Dockery who, from the author's description, seems like a good-looking guy with
the luck of a straight man in a gay bar....
After a
disastrous game that leaves him physically broken and mentally defeated,
Dockery wakes up from a 24-hour coma only to face a mob of angry Cleveland
Brown fans and several death threats.
We then follow
our fallen hero to la bella
And this is when
the trouble starts, for the average non-American reader, anyway. Grisham,
unfortunately, thinks that all his readers are well versed with the terms and
technicalities of this very American sport - doesn't the man know that the
"beautiful game" is what the rest of the world plays, not the
American version?
Halfway through
the book, I was tempted to put it down and Google the football terms that the
author uses, to my mind, excessively, just so that I could get a clearer
picture of what the heck he's talking about. What is a 50-yard penalty? Or
bootleg? Or flipped and faked?
All this
unnecessary detail about the game - the man describes every move, every
throw, every fall, ad nauseam - can make
following the storyline very frustrating.
Perhaps, I
thought to myself, after the umpteenth description of a great goal kick, this
book isn't suitable for non-sports fans? So I asked my friend, a sports
fanatic, if he could explain to me the game of football.
He started with
Manchester United, then stopped with shrug and a
"Dunno", when I added the word American in
front of "football".
If a die hard fan
of all things sporting couldn't tell me what American football was all about,
then how was I, a bookworm, a sitcom junkie and a 60kph type of driver, ever
going to follow the game just by reading about it?
And that is when I
realised the secret to thoroughly enjoying this book:
whenever Grisham dissected game play, I'd skim through quickly because I learnt
that re-reading the paragraph seven times wouldn't bring clarity, anyway.
Once you do that,
you can settle in to enjoy the man's writing. Grisham does a wonderful job
of bringing Italy to life, evocatively describing the pastas, wines, cheeses,
places and, even more beautifully, its people.
He is
excellent at illustrating the Italian way of life just through words - so
much so that, once, I could have sworn I could smell the fresh aroma of the
coffee he was writing about (okay, I guess it could have been my mother brewing a cup in
the kitchen).
Even with nary a
courtroom scene, Playing for Pizza has almost everything it takes to
be a good John Grisham novel, once you ignore the irritating football
commentaries.
It's obvious that
the author offers this book with a dash of love and a whole lot of camaraderie,
so Playing for Pizza is
well worth reading. But don't say that I didn't warn you about the football
lessons, capiche ?
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