Playing Days
Fresh out of college and uncertain how to proceed with life, the narrator of Ben Markovits' Playing Days finds himself drifting towards a career that once obsessed his father - professional basketball. Gaining a place on a minor league German team, he leaves Texas and lands in the small rather desolate town of Landshut, playing basketball with an eclectic group of teammates, training for most of the day and then trying to find ways to fill the rest of it. It's an odd, isolated existence, punctuated by the intense excitement - and often intense disappointment - of the game. But then he meets Anke, a young single mother who happens to be the former wife of one of his teammates; and their tentative, burgeoning relationship becomes as significant and as life changing as the game itself.
3.8 out of 5 based on 9 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
336 |
| RRP |
£12.99 |
| Date of Publication |
June 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-0571251810 |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber |
| |
Fresh out of college and uncertain how to proceed with life, the narrator of Ben Markovits' Playing Days finds himself drifting towards a career that once obsessed his father - professional basketball. Gaining a place on a minor league German team, he leaves Texas and lands in the small rather desolate town of Landshut, playing basketball with an eclectic group of teammates, training for most of the day and then trying to find ways to fill the rest of it. It's an odd, isolated existence, punctuated by the intense excitement - and often intense disappointment - of the game. But then he meets Anke, a young single mother who happens to be the former wife of one of his teammates; and their tentative, burgeoning relationship becomes as significant and as life changing as the game itself.
Reviews
The Guardian
Alex Clark
“[What Markovits really wants is] a way to understand himself. This is the traditional territory of the rites-of-passage novel, but it is territory that the author navigates with subtlety and poignancy. In between, he actually tells us about basketball, which is less easy to grasp (perhaps especially for a British readership not greatly familiar with the sport's vocabulary). But even in the most thickly described on-court scenes, he manages to communicate something about the implacable logic of competition, its horrible lack of mercy.”
19/06/2010
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The Independent
James Urquhart
“As in his beautifully observed Manhattan quartet, Either Side of Winter, he brings a poignance and lyric intensity to these maturing relationships… Playing Days delivers a sharply honest account of the mostly selfish impulses of a young man”
30/06/2010
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The Independent on Sunday
Thomas Bunstead
“If, in certain parts, [his] light touch feels a little too light and certain elements are skipped over ... we certainly don't want a biographer to pretend his subject understood the full significance of things as he was doing them. Overall, whether writing on questions of class, race, language, cultural difference, or the people who touched him during the year, Markovits is unquestionably a sharpshooter.”
30/05/2010
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The New Statesman
Olivia Laing
“Markovits is an exceptionally adept chronicler of human interaction, and his strongest achievement in this elegant, thoughtful novel is to show that, of the many complicated games people play, those acted out on court might prove the most meaningful of all.”
07/06/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Lucy Daniel
“[The] elegiac strain lifts a personal story into a more intriguing one about losing and winning, an evocative sporting memoir into a tale of growing and becoming, and how ambition measures up with experience. It takes great skill to write this well about things that don’t happen.”
26/06/2010
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Times Literary Supplement
David Horspool
“To the uninitiated the refusal to simplify or translate jargon can seem wilful. But it is of a piece with Markovits’s approach to authenticity... Playing Days is, deliberately, an odd, hybrid creation, but it succeeds in combining an emotionally honest coming-of-age narrative with a convincing evocation of the artificial, cynical, yet curiously idealistic, world of professional sport.”
18/06/2010
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The Financial Times
Dan Friedman
“Playing Days is a humble and sensitive portrayal of a young adult trying to find his feet on the basketball court and in the world. Markovits treads a fine line between indulgence of his awkward younger self and laying out the underlying dynamics of the situation with the alacrity of the more experienced man and father he has become.”
10/06/2010
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The Observer
James Purdon
“The repetitiousness of sports writing mars some of the on-court passages: Markovits's descriptions of the game have neither Updike's erotic charge in Rabbit, Run nor the fuller-throated late-Beat rhythms of Bob Levin's neglected classic The Best Ride to New York. At times the prose lacks polish, and it may be that the roughness is one of those subtle felonies of fiction, a kind of texture in the style of an accomplished writer trying to come to terms with a version of his younger self.”
13/06/2010
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