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Posted by
Andre Zadorozny,
October 10, 2013 |
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Andre Zadarozny
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At the time of this writing, Hellas Verona have returned to Serie A, this, the first month of the 2013/1014 season. In the tradition of this resurrection, Luca Toni scored a brace lifting his Verona team back into the spotlight against AC Milan 2-1. Their victory in the first game of the new season makes the long awaited transition into the top flight of Italian football all the sweeter. Writing book reviews tends to be directed towards newer more current books, yet what I hope to convey through my choices is to ask questions, foster queries and make the reader understand the subject of football all the more, regardless of when the book was published.
A Season With Verona by translator, journalist, British ex-pat Tim Parks deals with the trials of what it means to be a fan of Hellas Verona in the Serie A during the 2000/2001 season. Parks agonizingly dissects all those questions which many football fans ask of themselves, and of their teams. Questions of racism, fear, politics, and how these ideas clash into one another on and off the pitch. Knowing that this book is over 10 years old should not discourage one from reading it as the questions raised are important concepts to be analyzed.
Parks allows us into the world of ordinary day to day life of the Verona fan and the Verona team.These two worlds clash with the extraordinary life of politics and football. Verona does not seem to be an incredibly interesting place, yet perhaps that is what makes this book so fascinating as it is this exact microcosm of life within a small city in the incredibly rich history of Italian football that tends to be missed by most football fans. It is precisely this kind of breaking through of illusions, the illusion of the team, and the illusion of the fan that Parks explores.
The city of Verona and the Veronese people are an incredibly difficult concept to pin down. Parks begins his journey with the desire of mapping an entire season by travelling with the Brigate Gialloblu, the supporters of Hellas Verona, those who travel to away games as well as supporting the team at home games. For Parks the supporter is cloaked in an array of contradictory ideals blurring the lines of what is truth and what is false. Parks does not flush out what they really are about, but uses these men and boys as talking points.
Young and old are defined by their team, their colours and their home life. Each seem to live contradictory lives between the city and the team. By travelling with the supporters, predominately by bus, Parks does well by not attempting to truly define what the supporter group is, but more of what it represents, a fiction, one in which is constructed by the ordinary citizen. According to Parks, "Identity is an effort of will," yet this construction of identity does not simply come from nothingness. Parks attempts to search for this identity.
Italy itself is a fractious country rife with division, and Verona is a city deeply involved within this separation. Simply by travelling throughout Italy Parks sees these divisions clearly. Rivalries between the North and the South predominant throughout the book and the question of what it means to be an Italian football fan. Parks delves deeply into what this search for identity means, what is the homeland of Verona, of Italy? Who is constructing it? Who is destroying it? Hellas Verona is the team at the centre of these questions, they are the lynchpin, at times the scape goat, a concoction of past mythologies. What does it mean to support Hellas Verona and whom do you have to hate in the process?
It is not easy to say that A Season With Verona is simply a book about racism. Hellas are a team in which racism has been an ugly blot upon a rather interesting footballing history beginning in 1903. Parks uses his book into looking what racism means, and what it is used for. Racism being used for a purpose, is at times a vary vague and troublesome concept. Parks attempts to emphasize his thesis in the shadows of the vague and contradictory elements of of what racism means to the team and to the fan.
For instance, Parks goes into how perception between the fan and the player is emphasized by interviewing Hellas players and asking direct questions on what racism means to them. He does the same for the fan, yet as a fan he sees firsthand the horrible monkey chants and racist elements of theBrigate. It seems difficult for Parks to understand racist beliefs and thoughts between both sides of the fan and the player, as the foreign translator/journalist ex-pat seemingly fluent in the Italian language, Parks himself is a series of contradictions attempting to find the truth in what he is witnessing. Who is the fan?
My only real issue with A Season With Verona, is an incredibly interesting yet long winded theme of the book, his constant use of sub plots. Parks use of these sub plots attempt to bring the readier into his world, the world of the Italian. We are allowed into this world through the lens of the current political and journalistic climate of the time. He uses the case of Luis Marsigila a priest of dubious origins who was beaten up by motorcycle masked men using anti-Semitic slurs as a talking point to frame the racist question. Or of the federal election between right-wing rampant Fascist sympathizer Silvio Berlusconi versus left leaning Francesco Rutelli, the ex mayor of Rome when defining politics within Italian football.
The sub plots are moulds, skeletons as it were to show us that his research connects between all facets of the Italian consciousness and that football is the world, connected to everything, controlling everything. But the density of the book notwithstanding Tim Parks' A Season With Verona is a must read for anybody interested in how football controls culture, politics and the individual.
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