Brilliant Orange

 Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer by David Winner is a celebration, a joyous salve for these miserable times. As I'm writing this, wildfires have rendered the air quality in my town past the "hazardous" indicator for over 24 hours, and we've stuffed wet towels at the base of our doors to keep smoke particles out of our air-conditioned little two-bedroom. That, of course, is added to the Pandemic, the balkanizan of social media, the election, the weirdo internet militias descending in my state's largest city. The start of online school. The isolation. The malaise. David Winner's book, written 20 years ago, is a fine escape.

Brilliant Orange is the obsessive ramblings of an English soccer fan about the Dutch. Yes, he describes their soccer--an innovative system called "Total Football"--but his aims are bigger. Winner attempts to link the style of play (of the Dutch National Team and of Ajax, Amsterdam's big team) to the unique Dutch national character. He spends a lot of time on Dutch art, engineering, architecture, history, politics, and culture. Most of his thesis makes sense, and the parts that don't are entertaining enough. Winner admits in his introduction that his book is more about subjective ideas than reality, and then he gives himself freedom to play with his musings. As someone who knows very little about the Netherlands, I learned an enormous amount and enjoyed every page. 

Summer

 Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard is the last in his "seasons" tetralogy, a strange collection that probably works best as examples of aestheticism. Ostensibly, the collection is a series of letters to his daughter. Autumn and Winter are both essay collections, as if introducing her to the world in three-page vignettes about mostly random objects. Spring is a strange memoir; Summer is a sprawling combination of essay, diary, and memoir, with a novella embedded somewhere in there as well. It's weird. It's pretty, too, and at this point I read Knausgaard more for his voice than anything else. He's a dour European atheist that can't help but plumb, relentlessly, the semidivine beauty all around him. It also helps that each of these books are physically beautiful: a different modern painter contributes several pieces to each work. 

Summer isn't perfect. After hundreds of pages, his essays get a little formulaic. The last essay would be more powerful if he didn't relate the exact same story in My Struggle: 6. And no one's buying at the end of Summer that this collection had anything to do with his daughter. I get the feeling that his publisher wanted him to crank out a series after My Struggle, and that at the end, he was just messing around. And yet. Knausgaard is still easily one of the best writers in the world. His thoughts, which have always explored the banal, are still so eloquent that I'll pick up whatever he writes. As a bonus, the "seasons" series is the most accessible of all of his works: most of my friends aren't as riled up as I am to read thousands of pages of My Struggle but I've yet to share an essay from this collection that didn't land well, whether it was a family member or a high school sophomore.