The Tournament: A Novel of the 20th Century [Hardcover]

John Clarke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 2003

A novel of the 20th century in which the greatest thinkers and personalities engage in a two-week tennis tournament 'If you didn't know better you'd think this city had gone crazy. The streets of Paris are full of celebrities and media, and out at the stadium the crowds are already huge as players pound the practice courts in preparation for the greatest tournament of the modern era. At the airport, where they've opened three more runways and put on extra staff, players and officials have been arriving like migrating birds. From all corners they've come, the stars of the modern game. What a line-up!' -from The Tournament he most unusual tennis tournament in history is about to start. Albert Einstein is seeded fourth, Chaplin, Freud, and van Gogh are in the top rankings, and seeded first is Tony Chekhov. In all, 128 players-everyone from Louis Armstrong to George Orwell, Gertrude Stein to Coco Chanel-are going to fight it out until the exhilarating final match on center court. The Tournament is a funny, strange, and beguiling book in which, game by game and match by match, the world's most creative thinkers put their tennis skills to the ultimate test. And if you read carefully, you'll be set for life-having learned the cultural history of the 20th century!

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Clarke's chatty latest novel boasts an outrageous premise: the greatest minds of the 20th century-128 of them to be exact-have gathered in Paris for a two-week tennis tournament. Hence there's "Jerry" Salinger, "SuperTom" (T.S.) Eliot, "Plum" (P.G.) Wodehouse and other luminaries (Darwin, Magritte, Earhart, Wittgenstein, Rachmaninov, Barthes, etc.) trading backhands and parrying wits. One-liners abound, about "Doc" Freud's theories regarding seeing ones' parents "in the act of congress" and "Ernie" Hemingway's constant search for the sun. Clarke's apparent aim-beneath the yuks-is to offer an entertaining cultural education. But with a new game beginning every few paragraphs, readers are introduced to a dizzying array of characters who never transcend caricature. Dali plays imaginary tennis, Auden expounds in verse and Munch sits "throughout the press call with his hands up to his face, his mouth open and a look of blind panic in his eyes." A few short interludes allow relief from the tennis-game-recap narrative, most notably the communist conspiracy surrounding the disappearance of Rosa Luxemburg and a number of other individuals from the tournament, but the novel quickly returns to tennis. The author of The Complete Dagg, A Dagg at My Table and others writes an intermittently amusing tale, but readers may feel this was a great idea best realized in a shorter, more comic form.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Imagine, if you will, 128 of recent history's greatest writers, thinkers, scientists, musicians, actors, etc., participating in a two-week tennis tournament. Sarah Bernhardt versus Coco Chanel; Aldous Huxley versus Paul Robeson; Vladimir Nabokov versus Henry Miller--matchups that seem wildly inappropriate and delightfully perverse. Norman Mailer is covering the tournament for Tennis magazine; the tournament referee is Charles Darwin. It's a wacky idea, and although it's mostly played for laughs, the author has somehow managed to make this preposterous premise pay off. The novel, which is structured like a day-by-day report on the progress of the tournament, is completely original, a crash course in the history of twentieth-century culture. The dialogue is cheerfully nutty, as most of the characters speak lines that parody themselves (Gertrude Stein: "A win is a win is a win"). This is one of those novels that shouldn't work and yet somehow it does, leaving us shaking with laughter and possessing a vivid sense of the competition between ideas and points of view that shapes our culture. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion; 1 edition (September 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401300928
• ISBN-13: 978-1401300920
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,048,648 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intellectual firework show, July 29, 2009

By 

Boko (New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Tournament: A Novel of the 20th Century (Hardcover)

Clarke, an Australian-New Zealand author, poet and screenwriter, has produced an entire novel of original and utterly compelling one-liners covering a truly impressive range of 20th century philosophers, scientists, poets, dancers, painters and so forth, as they compete in the intellectual tennis match of the 20th century: Salvador Dali is cautioned for hanging his watch over the net, Einstein's serves only appear to exceed the speed of light and James Joyce's on-court verse is a wonder to behold (here, in his match against an increasingly peeved T S Eliot):

"'Tell me a tale of Jim and Tom' hummed Joyce to himself, 'all of the river is flowing Jim, the river is flowing over him, the rivering under the floater Tom, the blow to just under the nose is gone, and into the afterglow is one, and go with afterburners on, and go with the flow from here to there, and go with knowing your man Flaubert, and everythings fine and Dante there, and then as you hit the final straight, you hammer it down the line and wait, and look at the time and consummate.'"

If you have even a superficial grasp of half the participants, it's endlessly entertaining and one can only marvel at Clarke's wit and insight.