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Title: Granta 45: Gazza Agonistes by Bill Buford ISBN: 0-14-014065-4 Publisher: Granta Books Pub. Date: December, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Misleading Title
Comment: The title of Gazza Agonistes pretends to a pitch of literary ambition that the text itself does nothing at all to bring into fulfilment. There is nothing special about the writing here - not even judged as journalism, much less as what I hoped (especially from an established poet) might be an attempt at contemporary mythopoeia. Having said that, it is very readable. I just got the wrong idea about it from the title. I only read it because of the title. Not that I regret reading it, now that I have read it.

Rating: 4
Summary: Aptly Titled, Well Worth Reading
Comment: The title piece, "Gazza Agonistes" is 112 page mini-biography of English soccer superstar Paul Gascoigne. What makes it more than an expanded sports or style section profile is the author. Ian Hamilton is a well-known biographer, poet, and essayist, and reading someone of his caliber write about soccer as a fan is always a nice departure from the norm. Gascoigne's story--the sort of rise and stumble of a mercurial and talented boy--ends a little abruptly as he was still in the prime of his career at the time of the writing, even so, it's worth reading.

The rest of the issue includes some arresting photo portraits of WWI veterans, 30+ pages devoted to the consequences of the end of the Soviet empire, a long piece by Jonathan Rabin about the Mississippi flooding which didn't look that interesting, a 40 page short story by Ethan Canin that I also skipped, and more intriguingly, an 18 page story by Nick Hornby called "Fourteen and After." This story is basically an early draft of the earliest parts of "High Fidelity", in some areas word for word. Neat.