This might be the oddest book ever written about football. It is also fascinating, insightful and occasionally exasperating.
It consists of letters exchanged between the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard and the Swedish writer Frederik Ekelund during the 2014 World Cup. Ekelund is on the spot in Brazil, carousing in Rio with his South American friends, scoring in beach football matches and shaking hands with Diego Maradona or, perhaps, as he later learns, a Maradona lookalike. Knausgaard is back in Europe, watching the football on television, coping with family life and pouring out his thoughts to his distant correspondent. “Got your meandering letter,” Ekelund writes, and readers familiar with My Struggle, Knausgaard’s much-acclaimed, multivolume novel, will know what he means.
Ekelund himself regularly wanders from
