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This Sporting Life by David Storey

This Sporting Life
by

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This Sporting Life by David Storey is one of the ‘1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
Nine out of 10

David Storey is the author of Saville, named ‘the best of the Booker winners’ and given that this reader has enjoyed This Sporting Life, the Booker Prize winner must be placed at least at number 1,001 on the list of novels that we must read, albeit it has come to sound somewhat jocular, for even for one has time on his hands – incidentally, positive psychology suggests (or is it a commandment) that we would be better off with time affluence than with the oligarch type of fortune, that should be ceased these days anyway, unless you park it in one of those mercantile, vile places that ignore the war and welcome riches, no matter what the blood cost…such as Dubai, turkey…boycott them and the rest, if you agree with this scrivener – reading the 1,000 must will be a challenge and the suggestion would be to finish some of the essentials, with an eye also on the thousands of pages they may have…

Arthur Machin is the hero of a narrative that The Guardian described like this ‘This Sporting Life has just reached its half-century and it remains the best novel written by a former sportsman or woman’ and we may have to change the ‘hero’ label…there was the hesitation, the thought of editing, deleting the word, but then his attraction resides in his ambivalence, he is both a big, powerful, brave man – president Zelensky appears to be the Number One across the world figure that we could, perhaps should use as standard now, on the Real Time show of the other day, the conclusion was reached that he is The Sexiest Man of 2022 and that competition is over, since women across the planet are seduced, awed by the defender of the Ukrainian freedom and independence, which gave place to some comments on the new image of male role models, woke activism and more – and at the same time a gorilla.
At the start of the saga, we find him wounded, he has been in a rugby game and due to the slowness of a team mate, he had been hit badly, front teeth are broken and he needs a dentist and false dentures, seeing as this is just before Christmas (a date is not given, as far as I can remember, but this would be post war Britain, in the fifties) they need to find a specialist on the same day and the industrialist that plays a key role in the committee patronizing the team, who is also owner of the factory where the hero works, Mister Weaver arranges for a dentist, who is rather reluctant to do his job, unless he is sure the five guineas he is asking for the removal of all the remains of the front teeth and the replacement is paid for

The story is told alternating between different time frames, the time of the injury during the game, the follow up, with the party at the Weaver house, where Arthur aka Art, also called Tarzan by one Josephine, is suffering for a while from the effects of the tranquilizer used at the dentist office, tries to find a place to rest, only to have to wait for a team mate that is ‘entreating’ a ‘sample’ – this is one word used for a girl, they were called birds and ‘bint’ in A Kind of Loving by Stan Barstow http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/a... which also deals with This Sporting Life, the habits of the lower class, uneducated men and women, as they were some seventy years ago, and many of them clearly still are today... just look at the way they vote and you get the picture…

As he is trying to rise up in society, at least for the time when he is a professional rugby player, for after that, a steep decline in living standard is to be expected, Art is moving in as a tenant of Mrs. Valerie Hammond, a widow with two children, Lynda and Ian, with whom he would have a very tumultuous, challenging, rather destructive, strange relationship, to begin with, he is happy with the low rent he is paying, she needs extra income, since her late husband, Eric, has died in an accident, which the rumors say that might have been a suicide, at the same Weaver works where the protagonist is employed…
Gradually, the tenant gets closer to the landlady and they have sex, only to use a term to describe this affair would be difficult and one reason why this novel is so rewarding and enjoyable is to follow the dynamic of their interactions, the clash of their personalities and eventually to live their lives – to quote Umberto Eco “The person who doesn’t read lives only one life…The reader lives 5,000…Reading is immortality backwards”- what they have is sex, but the man seems to be growing infatuated, some may even say in love with the woman – especially with hindsight, looking at the manner in which he tries to convince her that he needs to stay, then try to get back to her, when she is ill, staying with her at the hospital, willing to pay for her to get a private room and the thoughts, desires we find, the loyalty, faithfulness kept when as a football celebrity, he was admired by most of the girls in town – while Valerie is a more difficult question.

She is aware that she is older than her let-us-call-him-partner for the time being, and does not want to be disappointed, indeed, thrown into despair once she loses him, just like it had happened with her husband, and the fact that he drives them in his car, buys a fur coat and toys for the children, eventually gets a television set when prompted, looks like a way to ‘buy her’ and then there is the gossip of the neighbors, who see her as a slut and then as part of the ever more querulous dynamic, she is accusing Art of treating her as a whore, which is part of the main problem they have, that of miscommunication, misunderstanding – there is a good chance that she does know better, and he is confused and maladroit, gauche, a big bully, too concerned with himself, unable to express what he feels, and then unsure of what his emotions are, never mind sharing them with someone else – they will feel the impact of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as described by John Gottman in his quintessential The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/07/t... which is the best guide one can find…
John Gottman has an accuracy rate in his evaluations of over ninety percent and is able after a few minutes of interaction – presumably also using some Thin Slicing Effect, about which you find in another monumental psychology opus magnum, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/05/b... - to say which couples will stay together and those that will separate…Arthur and Valerie do not seem suitable for each other, due to Criticism, Defensiveness, Stonewalling and Contempt, which are the mentioned Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and it would be quite hard to envisage a world in which they would live together happily, forever after…

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Reading Progress

April 5, 2022 –Started Reading

April 12, 2022 –Finished Reading

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