Panenka

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Marie-Thérèse has one friend, Carla, who can be relied upon to ask the questions Marie-Thérèse would rather avoid. Arthur has friends, likes sweets and football, is an ordinarily lovable and wholly convincing child of the sort rarely encountered in literary fiction. They all live in a run-down but friendly part of Dublin, where things are grubby but you can go safely about your business. Photograph: peepo/Getty Images The protagonist blames a missed penalty for the decline of his whole town. But a novel is not its subject matter, and it’s the distinctive style which is likely to divide Panenka’s readers. At times it has the simplicity of a fairytale; elsewhere we get awkward aphorisms (“Loneliness is a torch: it can show you things about yourself”) that make it hard to tell whether the guileless voice belongs to the characters or the author.

Panenka, the book, derives its name from this football term as the main character in the novel, Joseph, was given the name Panenka when his career took a nosedive that was to have a serious impact on his life and the path he took. Now in his fifties, Panenka is suffering from severe migraines, or as he calls them, his ‘Iron Mask.’ Living with his one-time estranged daughter, Marie-Thérèse and her young son, Arthur, he is in denial as to what the cause could be. He chooses to remain an anonymous individual in his hometown, living in an area known as the Crucible in a town that is obsessive over football and the local team Seneca FC. He drinks in the same pub, he goes to the same barbers, he has his own small group of friends. He doesn’t stand out. He just gets on with his life. Marie-Thérèse is now a trainee manager at a supermarket. Her marriage is in a funk and moving in with her Dad gave them an opportunity to reflect on past mistakes and right a few wrongs. Her mother has since left town, moving on with her own life, and Marie-Thérèse is now considering some life-changing decisions about hers and Arthur’s future. Leonard and Hungry Paul is one of my favourite reads of this year, so I was keen to read Hession's sophomore novel. Football in the UK is deeply embedded into the identity and culture of the people and the town. Every loss and win correlates to their spirit and pride for better or for worse. And for the players, this can heighten their self-worth or diminish it. FIFA World Cup Spain - Statistics - Players - Top goals". FIFA.com. FIFA. Archived from the original on 25 November 2018 . Retrieved 2 December 2017. As a character, Panenka himself is different from Leonard or Hungry Paul, not as innocent, perhaps less immediately appealing. He has lived life and made mistakes, and his flaws are woven into his character. But this adds a richness and maturity to the book: for all the quirks of Panenka’s life story, he is deeply relatable and realistic. He is not a bad man, but he is far from perfect, and his complexities and struggles ring absolutely true. As his history is gradually revealed, each strand adds to the picture, and we come to understand him in a way that feels organic and meaningful. This book is delicately and expertly crafted – Hession is a storyteller in whom a reader can place absolute trust. Panenka flows along so smoothly and subtly that the writer side of my brain couldn’t help but marvel at how much work must have gone into making it all seem so effortless, while the reader side of me just revelled happily in the quiet intricacy of the story.Humans are by nature romantic creatures. By that I don't mean full of love: I mean that they like the idea of things more than the reality of them.”

Panenka is a subtle masterpiece: the fascinating painting on the cover art could not be more appropriate. With careful, intentional strokes, Hession paints a word-portrait of a man who is neither better nor worse than any of us: he is simply a flawed human being who has made mistakes, who faces obstacles, who tries to live his life in relation to those around him. A good heart beats at the centre of this book, and though Panenka is sadder in tone than Hession’s first novel, it still has that warm glow of gentle faith in humanity, in the power of connection, in finding a way in the world that makes sense for each one of us. It is a beautiful book, and I loved it. His name was Joseph, but for years they had called him Panenka, a name that was his sadness and his story. Cómo nació el penal picado a lo Panenka?". Pasión Fútbol. Archived from the original on 5 May 2019 . Retrieved 5 May 2019. But isn’t that what allowing yourself be loved is all about – letting something greater than fear into your life?”His daughter, Marie-Therese and her seven-year-old son, Arthur, came to live with him, following her separation from the boy's father. Panenka, his next book, has football in it. It’s a moving story about a retired footballer grappling with a sense of failure. What inspired it? “I remember reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee,” he says. “Disgrace is a really interesting topic and it didn’t really deal with it in a way that I was expecting… Also, I had read an interview with Daniel Timofte, the guy who lost a penalty against Ireland for Romania… He hadn’t got over it. And people hadn’t let him get over it. And though he was a very talented footballer it was still the thing he was known for. The main theme of that book is life’s unfixability. I think our mentality at times is trying to fix the things in our life to allow us to move on to try and say, well, how can you move on if they’re not fixable?” Unashamedly optimistic I knew that if anyone was going to make me actually give a shit about football, it was Ronan Hession. Thank god, because I went into this with sky-high expectations and I would've been crushed if it had been anything other than utterly fantastic. a b "Antonin Panenka - the footballer Pele described as "either a genius or a madman" ". 20 June 2007. Archived from the original on 9 February 2011 . Retrieved 14 November 2010. of the best and worst Panenkas ever". Planet Football. 3 June 2020. Archived from the original on 31 December 2017 . Retrieved 23 September 2020.

Actually, to be fair, I still don't give a shit about football. But I care that it mattered to this story, enough to read the football scenes carefully instead of skipping them. Enough to have a visceral emotional reaction to them. Because good god, this is a gut punch of a book. It brought tears to my eyes, to the point where I had to look away to compose myself. I honestly can't remember when a book last did that to me. Perth Glory A-League Grand Final offside controversy". The West Australian. 19 May 2019. Archived from the original on 3 June 2019 . Retrieved 3 June 2019. I remember reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee. Disgrace is a really interesting topic and it didn’t really deal with it in a way that I was expecting… Also, I had read an interview with Daniel Timofte, the guy who lost a penalty against Ireland for Romania… He hadn’t got over it. And people hadn’t let him get over it. And though he was a very talented footballer it was still the thing he was known for. The main theme of that book is life’s unfixability. I think our mentality at times is trying to fix the things in our life to allow us to move on to try and say, well, how can you move on if they’re not fixable? Similarly, Hession’s conclusion to the story could be seen as a cop-out. But the success of Leonard and Hungry Paul suggests there’s a big appetite for gentler, less dramatic storytelling; and in our current anxious environment, Panenka’s rejection of the grim, in favour of small moments of grace, looks like a bold and successful choice.When Panenka finds at the book’s opening that his blinding headaches (which he calls the iron mask) are harbingers of a much more serious issue he resolves not to burden his family with the details (not least as Marie-Therese is talking about , or his friends (a small and eccentric group he meets at a nearby bar) or a 40 something hairdresser with who he forges a burgeoning relationship built around mutual identification in a shared sense of past disillusionment.