Panenka

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UEFA Euro 1980 - History - Czechoslovakia-Italy - UEFA.com". UEFA.com. 4 October 2003. Archived from the original on 5 May 2016 . Retrieved 18 April 2016. Remember, if you vote for a book and it wins, you are implicitly promising to read the book and participate in the discussion. Those headaches could provide a narrative driver, but instead the story rattles like a pinball between all those whose lives Joseph touches: daughter, friends, hairdresser and more. What the book loses in focus from this it gains in breadth, with pleasing comic crosstalk between characters, affecting moments of intimacy during a haircut, and spookily well-observed scenes of parent-child interaction.

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. Life as a series of vignettes alluding to no real development, until you can sit and reflect, is an amazing way of living. As well as winning the 1976 European Championship, Panenka helped Czechoslovakia come third in the 1980 tournament, after scoring once again in a 9–8 penalty shootout win. [12] In the finals of the 1982 World Cup, Panenka scored twice with penalties, but these were the only Czechoslovakian goals, and the team did not progress beyond the first group stage. [13] [14]

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https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/socc...) with Daniel Timofte who failed to score a penalty for Romania against Ireland in the 1990 world cup: In football, a penalty technique in which the taker chips the ball artfully into the centre of the goal, counting on the likelihood that the goalkeeper will have dived to either side’ Panenka is a type of goal in football where you aim to the middle and have a swoop down moment, rather than going straight to a corner. Football? I know, but trust me. His name was Joseph, but for years they had called him Panenka, a name that was his sadness and his story.”

His name was Joseph, but for years they had called him Panenka, a name that was his sadness and his story ." Panenka has to face a few realities about his own life, his future and his relationships, both past and present. If, like me, you have absolutely no knowledge of football, Rónán Hession provides the reader with a definition of the term Panenka at the very beginning of the book – Panenka is what he is called but his name is Joseph and for over 25 years he had to live with a mistake that not only made his team lose the game but set a domino effect of several losses for him -- his family, identity, and all his closest relationships. Furthermore, unlike most artists, Hession has never fantasised about leaving his day job, never sat “dreaming of an alternative existence”. He points to a rich legacy of civil servants who wrote, people like Egyptian Nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and Flann O’Brien and Thomas Kinsella. “Civil servants are interested in things very close to what writers are interested in,” he says. “You’re interested in society, and fundamentally, the position of individuals in society… That ‘zoom in, zoom out’ type perspective of the civil servant feels very natural in novel writing. I’ve a very interesting job. I love it very much… You’re dealing with some of the marginalised people in society. It is quite grounding. But also, you’re in a position to do things about it. I believe in my country. I believe in Irish society. My interest in the civil service and my writing is to try and contribute to that... And I’m okay with writing books that fit into my life. I believe in integration of everything. I’m not really one for compartmentalising. I try to be the same in writing as I am in work as I am with my kids. I don’t feel I’m playing roles.”

Joseph (Panenka), Marie-Thérèse, Arthur and Esther. Four individuals. Four lives. Panenka is their story.

Panenka has spent 25 years living with his disastrous mistakes and begins to rebuild an improvised family life with his estranged daughter and her seven year old son. Faced with losing everything, he meets Esther, and together, they find resonance in each years previously a man misses a crucial penalty against his team’s deadliest rivals and feels that he bears the guilt for the disappointment of a whole community – now he has the chance of personal redemption and the team the chance of collective redemption. A book I read by conincidence immediately after England’s national wave of euphoria at the victory in the Euro 2021 Semi Finals - 25 years after the now national hero’s Gareth Southgate’s miss against Germany in the 1996 tournament.Leonard and Hungry Paul is one of my favourite reads of this year, so I was keen to read Hession's sophomore novel. This book is almost exclusively made up of really emotional, reflective dialogues and inner monologues full of figurative language and those types of emotional statements that you get at the ending of a sentimental movie. I really don't like this over-the-top writing. I'm not saying that characters who are meant to represent "ordinary" people can't be reflective and have deep conversations and use metaphors, but the characters all speak in the exact same type of highly stylized language and almost exclusively have deep conversations with each other, like 80% of the book is that. It was too much, and all the "depth" felt actually quite surface-level to me. Serendipitously topical and (from the author of the word of mouth phenomenon “Leonard and Hungry Paul”) another wonderful antinode to the tendency to equate misanthropy and pessimism with literary merit. Panenka is now an adult, grandfather and a really bloody nice guy who is crippled with guilt and shame from this match. He also suffers from crippling headaches and sleepless nights which he refers to as the Iron Mask.