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Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby |
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Fever Pitch is the story of
a football fan. The reader doesn’t know his name, but he can guess that the story
is autobiographical, and the fan is Nick Hornby
himself. His favorite club is Arsenal London. |
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The book has no plot like a
novel or a love story, but it’s divided into three stages of the life of the
narrator. These stages are his childhood (1968-1975), his adolsescence
(1976-1986) and his manhood (1986-1992). The chapters contain different
football games of Arsenal and the narrator connects each game with a memory of
his life. I think the story is autobiographical because narrator and author have the same
key dates of their lives. Hornby seems to write
about his feelings and his point of view. |
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The book starts in 1968.
This is a very important year in the life of the narrator. He is eleven years
old and his parents have separated. He hasn’t got a very close relationship
with his dad, whom he visits every week. So his father thinks that the
situation would get better if he and his son went to a football game of
Arsenal. But this is a mistake. Instead of getting a closer relationship with
his father, the narrator becomes obsessed with football. This is the
important point in the story. From now on the narrator lets his life be dominated
by football. He remarks about this at the end of the book: |
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„It was strange,
trying to write about how miserable most of my footballing
life had been (...) my whole life flashed before my eyes. A nil-nil draw,
against a nothing team, in a meaningless game (...) “ |
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In the first stage of the
narrator’s life, his childhood, he describes his emotions when he first
enters the football stadium of Highbury, when Arsenal scores „his“ first goal, his first season and the first titles.
Arsenal wins the „Double“, which means the championship and the cup, but he isn’t
allowed to watch the games, so he is very sad at that moment of glory. He
compares his life with the career of Arsenal, because both have ups and downs.
Arsenal during the season and Hornby in his life.
At the end of this stage he realises that football isn’t the only thing in
life and he starts to be interested in other things such as women and beer. |
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In the next stage, the narrator’s
adolescence, Arsenal is still present, but another club enters the life of Hornby, Cambridge United. They are a lot worse than
Arsenal, but Hornby is studying at
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In the last stage the
reader can see how the narrator thinks about his life and the way it has been
dominated by football. The passage, which I inserted in this summary, shows
this very clearly in my opinion. |
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Fever Pitch is an autobiographical
story. The narrator stays at the centre of the story and there aren’t any
other characters, who have a real function in it.
The narrator speaks about his family and friends, but we don’t know a lot
about them, just that his parents are separated. I think this shows once
again that the narrator is living in his own world, which he has created by
himself. He and Arsenal are the protagonists in this world and the whole
story is concentrated on these two. The reader learns a lot about Arsenal and
also about the narrator, but about the other characters there is little
information. For example we don’t know the name of his girlfriend, he just talks
about „her“ and calls her „she“. If I were in love with
a woman, I would speak her name all the time, above all at the beginning of
the relationship, but the narrator doesn’t mention the name of his girlfriend
any one single time. |
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The reader doesn’t know his
own name either, but I imagined all the time that his name was Nick Hornby. For me it was clear that he doesn’t mention his
name, because this story is meant to be autobiographical. But it could also
be that he doesn’t mention his name, because he wants to show that this isn’t
a story just of one individual person but of every football fan in the world. |
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It’s funny that Hornby names a chapter „Pete“. Pete is a new friend of
the narrator’s, who is also obsessed by football and Arsenal. This man has a
name, because he is „worthy“ to enter the world of
Arsenal. |
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But it isn’t that there are
no names in the book. There are a lot of names, but unfortunately they aren’t
easy to keep in mind. Hornby mentions nearly every
player of Arsenal and also names of the stadiums and nicknames of the fans.
In the next part of this review, „The Theme“, there will be a link with a list,
which helps to keep track. |
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The book would be easy to
understand, because the English isn’t very difficult. But because of the
special football words and the description of football in |
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In this part I’d like to
talk about my thoughts while reading the book. A football fan talks about his
emotions, he talks about his experiences with football. As I am also a
football fan, I began to compare the narrator with me and my experiences. |
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Highbury |
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The first succes of the narrator was the Double of his favorite club, but he wasn’t allowed to celebrate with
all the other fans. I immediately thought about the Double of the FC Basel in
2002. This was also the first, big succes for me as
a fan of |
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But I think Hornby exaggerates a little bit. I wouldn’t think about
castration because of football or wouldn’t watch a game, if my girlfriend
fainted beside me. The most important thing in the life of the narrator is
football and he forgets everything around him, when he watches a game. I am
also very nervous during a game, but it’s not that extreme, not at all. But at
the end of the book he realises this and gets „normal“. I think this is
normal, because we are getting older and have more experience. Children get
carried away a lot more easily and think that their idols on the field are
the most important thing in the world. The narrator mentions this also, he
says that he is like a little child and football halted his development
during the time when he was a very extreme fan and could think of anything
but Arsenal. |
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Of course, football can
bring out other sides of the fans. I mean there are a lot of businessmen who
jeer at the enemy of the favourite club and scream swearwords. I don’t think
that they have the same behaviour in their offices. |
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But in my opinion this is
the fantastic thing about football. We can forget the problems of daily life
and take part in a great spectacle, all of us: fans, players and coaches. |
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As I said you find a lot of
information about the players of Arsenal and football in general in this
link: |
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I really hope, that
football continues to be an important part of my life, but to be honest, I also hope that the situations won’t be the same
as the one in the book, because this would be too much for me. But I don’t
think so. Football will give me the positive emotions I need to forget some
problems. |
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Looking for a good text
which characterises the book at its best, I thought of this scene: |
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„I
have more than once fantasised about Arsenal playing Tottenham in the Cup
Final; in this fantasy my son, as rapt and tense and unhappy as I was when I
first supported Arsenal, is a Spurs fan, and as we could not get tickets for
Wembley we are watching the game at home on TV. In the last minute the old
warhorse Kevin Campbell scores the winner... and I explode into a frenzy of
joy, leaping around the sitting room, punching the air, jeering at, jostling,
tousling the head of my own traumatised child. I
fear that I am capable of this, and therefore the mature, self-knowing thing
to do would be to see the vasectomist this
afternoon. If my father had been Swindon Town fan in 1969, on that awful
afternoon at Wembley, and had reacted appropriately, we would not have spoken
for twenty-two years.“ |
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When I think about the
book, I think about football, life and humour. In my opinion these aspects can
all be found in this scene. The reader can see how important Arsenal is for
the narrator, how much emotion the narrator has for his favourite club and
how this has a big influence on his life. I mean he even thinks about getting
castrated just because his son, who isn’t even born or at least conceived yet,
could be fan of another club, Tottenham Hotspurs, the archenemy of Arsenal. I
don’t think that there are many men, who would prefer being castrated to
having a son who supports the „wrong“ football club.
But it also shows Hornby’s sense of humour. When I
first read this scene I really had to laugh because I imagined this
spectacle, how the father is celebrating and jeering at his sad son, who goes
through his first big disappointment. The narrator remembers his first big
defeat and can feel how his son would be feeling at that moment. But instead
of giving up the celebration and consoling his son, he prefers to give up his
son and to celebrate such an experience. On the one hand this sounds very
dramatic and sad, but on the other hand we shouldn’t take this too seriously,
because Hornby wants to show the life of a fan with
some funny and also exaggerated scenes. This just shows how important Arsenal
is fort he narrator. |
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Just the fact that the
narrator has fantasised more than once about this possible scene in his life,
shows that he is a person who thinks a lot about life and the future, but
also how important Arsenal is for him. In this scene he makes a decision between
family and Arsenal. He decides against a family and for Arsenal. Normally the
family is the most important thing in the life of a human being. But he
narrator of this story decides at that moment of his life, at the age of 24,
that Arsenal is more important, or maybe also that Arsenal is his family. |
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Concluding I can say once
again that this scene represents a lot of the book and what it is about, but
it also shows the humorous style of Nick Hornby, an
excellent author. |
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