Skip to main content

Lost Empress by Sergio de la Pava review – a crazed American football farce

An uproarious yarn of an underdog team and its overdog owner takes in a shadowy criminal cartel, a stolen Dalí and the social tensions of a nation

In August 2016, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the start of a preseason game. The decision, he explained, was a silent protest at what he saw as a culture of police brutality, racial inequality and a systemic bias against minorities within the criminal justice system. The “take the knee” protest has since gone viral. It has been adopted by more than 200 players, threw the 2017 season into crisis and outraged Donald Trump, who derides the protesters as treacherous ingrates and wants them all to be fired. Previously a well-oiled bastion of monopoly capitalism (exclusively white-owned, yet disproportionately reliant on black talent), the NFL is in danger of becoming a revolutionary hotbed.

Sergio de la Pava’s freewheeling Lost Empress is a novel implicitly born out of these ongoing upheavals. Boldly billing itself as “a protest”, the book takes hold of American football and duly hot-wires it to the national grid, so that the sparks jump across a matrix that extends from stadium sport to the prison system to a shadowy criminal cartel known as the Absence. Reading it is a little like being accosted by a brilliant conspiracy theorist on the night bus home: assuming we go with the flow and ward off the occasional moments of outright exasperation, we may just come away converted.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2LGGLHP
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more