Forza Erotica

Yesterday, the Italian soccer team prepared to face Ireland in the European Championships. After two hard fought draws against tough competition (Croatia and Spain), Italy needed a convincing win against the Irish to advance into the knockout stage.  And, with the exception of the home country, and most of New Jersey, most of the world was rooting for Italy to fail.

The thing about the Italian soccer team is not that they're bad. It's that...well...they're very Italian.  The players all look like those stereotypical Italian assholes you see on movies, especially the goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, who, besides being maybe his generation's best keeper, also looks like somebody who would try to run you over in his Lamborghini while taking your girlfriend out for a ride......

He might be watching the ball.....or he might be planning to impregnate your daughter.

Besides the greasy patina of the players, their method of play, while stunningly effective in world soccer over the years, is not would you would call entertaining.  Labeled by some as "Master of the 1-0", they play suffocating defense, sit on the ball, and find a goal somewhere while choking the life out of the game.  Also, the Italians are known for "diving", or falling down on purpose to get a foul called. They tend to frustrate fans all over, and there is one particular reason they can continually get away with this: They are extremely fucking good at soccer.

"Sabbath's Theater" is a great book.  Maybe the best book I've read all year. (the other candidate being As I Lay Dying) But I concede, it is not for everyone.  Philip Roth apparently has a reputation for being a misogynist, and "Sabbath" is not the book that's going to convince anyone otherwise.  Sabbath is an aging puppeteer, amateur theater director, and all-around sopping pervert. The book, absent an actual plot, is more a character study, in the form of Sabbath having a mental breakdown at the loss of his favorite sex partner, and looking back at the various affairs, mishaps, and accusations that make up his life. And Sabbath is not written to be a sympathetic character.  His main talents lie in his sexual prowess and confidence, his vocabulary, and his ability to make people hate him.  A couple of book clubbers did express some sympathy, but it was of the "he just doesn't know any better" vein.  Which I would argue against: Sabbath does know better, he wants people to hate him, but on his terms, because he figures that they will hate him one way or another, so might as well be for a reason he chooses.

"Sabbath's Theater" is not a great book for creating a character everybody loves, but because Roth, at least in ST, writes so wonderfully. (Full disclosure, this is my first Roth book.  It will not be my last....) Everything is cleanly written, but not without descriptive flair.  Even when Sabbath starts to lose his mind, and the book goes stream-of-consciousness for a while, it's still interesting,  But the best thing to say about the book is that Sabbath feels real.  His choices, while not always correct....almost never correct, if fact, but they still all feel real.  Sabbath feels like a flesh-and-blood character, even when he's engaging insanity in a all-to-familiar manner.  Whether hallucinating that his dead mother is watching him commit adultery, or masturbating over his dead lover Drenka's grave, there is a lot in "Sabbath's" that's absurdist, but the book stayed firmly on the rails from start to finish.  And much like the fatherly-deprived women that revolve around the 63 year old puppeteer, I was skeptical at first, and my resolve was worn down until I couldn't help but want to join Sabbath on his journey, because for all his faults, (and Sabbath is a whirlwind of faults, erections, and vocabulary), he's definitely not boring.  And a lot of that credit goes to the writing. It takes talent to make you care about something that disgusts you.

Yesterday, Italy won 2-0, and advanced over a Croatia team that was a maybe a bit more deserving, and certainly more palatable.  Yet, and this is it's own perversion, I'm kind of excited to have Italy move on.  They don't have enough of a team this year to win it all, but somehow, it feels right to have them around, frustrating and annoying opponents for as long as they can.  Plus, when they finally do lose, the celebration might be just a little sweeter.