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Chinaman

Tekijä: Shehan Karunatilaka

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioMaininnat
2229120,594 (3.94)63
"Aging sportswriter W.G. Karunasena's liver is shot. As his health fades, he embarks on a frantic search for missing cricketer Pradeep Mathew, whose virtuosic bowling was once legendary. En route he discovers a six-fingered coach, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and unsettling truths about his country and its beloved sport."--P. [4] of cover.… (lisätietoja)
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Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 9) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
One for cricket lovers. A couple of retired old cricket fans dedicate their time to researching the career of a mysterious genius Sri Lankan bowler for a film and a book with the intention of doing justice to his largely ignored record. A mixture of real and ficticious cricketers and test matches and an incidental telling of a family tale of love through the ages. The author demonstrates his sharp sense of humour, his penchant for the surreal and his power of description which were to be all on display in his later Booker winning novel. ( )
  Steve38 | Dec 29, 2023 |
I must slightly caveat this 5* - if you're interested in cricket, the subcontinent (especially Sri Lanka) and have a tolerance for fictional unreliable memoirs, then you may love this book. If you are deficient in any of these criteria, this may not be the book for you.

However- for those still with me - I think this is a wonderful book. All about unfulfilled ambition, and legacy. And the beauty of sport. The beauty and the glory and the capriciousness and the tragedy - in short, the romance. All set against the backdrop of the history of Sri Lanka, with its civil war and corruption and bigotry, and punctuated by cricket matches. It is sad and sweet, and suffused with the wisdom and acceptance of old age (impressively, this despite being the first novel by Karunatilaka).

The book is named for the stock delivery bowled by an unorthodox left-arm spinner - the main delivery bowled by the main character. The plot follows a dissolute sports writer W.G. (Wije) Karunasena and cricket fan trying to find out what happened to Mathews, the greatest bowler Wije had ever seen.

Is Mathews fictional or real? It is difficult to know what's real and made up - certainly I recognised many of the cricketing stories. Having done a little bit of research I would say the vast majority is fiction, but Karunatilaka has done a great job of weaving the two together. This greatly enhances the "unreliable narrator" aspect of the book - if you don't know what bits have been borrowed from the real world, it's impossible to know which bits are supposed to be made-up in the suspended-disbelief fictional world.

In my googling, though, I found a couple of faked up websites about Pradeed Mathews - versions of cricinfo.com and crikipedia (with a strategic '1' in place of an 'i') - clearly created as supporting material for the book (one of these pages is featured in the book, but I only reached that after I found the page myself). So you have a fictional book that uses stories from the real world, with fictional bits leaking back out into the real world - it's kinda fascinating (and I'm certainly not saying it's unique, but it was very pleasing and effective to stumble across these fictional spillages).

http://pradeepmathew.com/
http://cric1nfo.com/player/srilanka/achive/1992/june/
http://crickiped1a.com/record/engine/asia/srilanka/player/pradeep_1992/

Minor faults: it is somewhat romaticising of alcoholism (this is well reversed by the end, but may be jarring during the reading). And I found it a bit tricky to keep track of all the side characters. This is partly due to unfamiliar Sri Lankan names, but also because of the discursive nature of the narrative. I don't think these hamper the book particularly.
( )
  thisisstephenbetts | Nov 25, 2023 |
A very strange book in the best way. Most sports books that I've read try to get you to identify with a hero, detail the ebb and flow of specific games, and are basically uncritical cheerleaders for their sport. This one does none of that; in fact hardly any cricket is actually played.

The story reminds me of the quote, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Take that idea, but imagine hearing rumours of one of these people with equal talent, tracing those stories, and trying to disentangle the truth from the deceptions and drunken misremembrances, and you'll get an idea of how romantic W. G.'s quest is.

( )
  NickEdkins | May 27, 2023 |
I was given this book as a gift because the giver had heard it described as the best novel written about cricket. It isn't, though entries in this category are few (Selincourt's The Cricket Match is probably the front-runner). Although it would be difficult to understand Chinaman without a good knowledge of cricket, the game is a device rather than the substance of the book. A shared obsession between the principal characters, 'cricket' could just as well have been 'snooker' or 'stamp collecting'. The major theme of the book is the mutability of the past – personal as well as sporting and political. The historical context is Sri Lankan's travails in the late twentieth century. For those unfamiliar with this latter subject (including me), be warned that the author is oblique in his references. He generally refers to key political figures by nicknames (e.g. 'Ms Second Generation', which I infer is Chandrika Kumaratunga). The other important ingredient in Chinaman is alcoholism and its effects. While the writing style is sometimes interesting (as is the cricket, if you're a fan), Chinaman left me cold. Given its length, there is nothing illuminating, enriching or even memorable about it. I waited to see if the final section (avoiding spoilers) would redeem the rest of the book, but it doesn't. From a technical perspective, the diagrams that are included are reproduced so poorly that they are illegible. I recommend you find a Wisden from the 80s or 90s and read that instead. ( )
  Lirmac | Jan 26, 2023 |
Until I read this book, I knew nothing about cricket except that it exists. I still couldn't tell you much about it in spite of having now passed my eyes over words describing many matches, strategies, accoutrements, and people pertaining thereto. It was all of this detail that led me to struggle through a lot of this book. I can imagine that someone who has never cared for baseball might struggle with the glorious opening 80 pages or so of DeLillo's Underworld or a great deal of Harbach's The Art of Fielding. So I felt about much of Chinaman.

Yes, there is sort of a mystery story afoot here too, and there's humor and occasional dips into what feels like authentic pathos (I dog-eared a couple of these), but for most of the book, I found these not worth all the miscellany about cricket. For much of my reading of the book, I continued because a friend recommended it and I wanted to be able to affirm that I had in fact read the book.

But then I got to the last 60 - 80 pages of the book, which I glided through effortlessly and, at times, raptly. The turn here at the end makes the book probably worthwhile, though not masterful through and through. I give it four stars because in the end it is nicely carried off, a sort of modern day Sri Lankan Tristram Shandy. ( )
  dllh | Jan 6, 2021 |
Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 9) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
No knowledge of or interest in the game of cricket is strictly necessary to appreciate the power and the delights of this novel about a dying alcoholic and retired sportswriter WG ("Wije") Karunasena, who decides that he will use what remains of his life to make a documentary about Sri Lankan cricket and, in particular, about a neglected but brilliant figure from its margins: PS Mathew. Wije's obsession with Mathew may form the spine of the book, but it does it in a way that makes it possible to focus on the obsession rather than the cricket if you're so inclined.

There are also many other things to focus on: friendships between old men, discord between a father and son, love between a man and his wife, ethnic conflagrations in Sri Lanka, the back-scratching and back-stabbing of the powerful, the ruination of a sport through its involvement with bookies, men with self-destruct buttons, conspiracies, the dead coming to life and the living coming to death, fame, ignominy, comedy and tragedy.
 
In his 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen plays a documentary-maker called Cliff Stern who is obsessed with Louis Levy, a philosopher whose life-affirming message he finds meaningful. But Levy takes his life, saying "I've gone out of the window", before Stern can complete the film. Levy's existence gave a meaning to Stern's life, becoming his magnificent obsession.

In Shehan Karunatilaka's debut novel, Chinaman, WG Karunasena is one such obsessed individual, and Pradeep Mathew, a beguiling left-arm spin bowler, the object of his affection. Ostensibly, Karunatilaka's novel is about cricket, but the game is the medium through which he talks about Sri Lankan life. "Wije", as Karunasena is known, personifies the inner struggles of an old man looking for that one final achievement to earn some self-respect.
 
A "Chinaman" in cricket is a particular delivery, a slower ball designed to fool the batsman into thinking it will bounce in the opposite direction to the one it does. It also, in Sri Lankan argot, is a term indicating gullibility. Likewise, the novel has two poles, and twists enough to wrong-foot the reader. On one level, it is the self-narrated account of a dying cricket journalist's attempt to make a documentary, and write a book, about Pradeep Mathew, who during the 1980s was Sri Lanka's most devastating and talented spin bowler, but who has mysteriously disappeared not only from the country but from the historical record; he may very well be dead.

On another level, or rather inconspicuously yet ominously trundling alongside this narrative, it is the story of Sri Lanka in the late 20th century: a country torn apart by terrorism and corruption, where old-boy networks are key, and where you can be killed horribly if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time: "The men with clubs and knives stormed the bus and asked passengers to speak Sinhala, to say words that Tamils found difficult to pronounce, like baaldiya. Irangani and Sabi passed the test, an elderly gentleman in front did not. He was dragged out and set on fire."
 
Sinun täytyy kirjautua sisään voidaksesi muokata Yhteistä tietoa
Katso lisäohjeita Common Knowledge -sivuilta (englanniksi).
Teoksen kanoninen nimi
Alkuteoksen nimi
Teoksen muut nimet
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi
Henkilöt/hahmot
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Tärkeät paikat
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Tärkeät tapahtumat
Kirjaan liittyvät elokuvat
Epigrafi (motto tai mietelause kirjan alussa)
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
If a liar tells you he is lying, is he telling the truth?
Omistuskirjoitus
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
For Suranjan, Dilo, Ranil, Mani and Percy
Ensimmäiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Pradeep Who?
Sitaatit
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Explain the differences between Sinhalese and Tamils? I cannot. The truth is, whatever differences there may be, they are not large enough to burn down libraries, blow up banks, or send children onto minefields. They are not significant enough to waste hundreds of months firing millions of bullets into thousands of bodies.
Left-arm spinners cannot unclog your drains, teach your children or cure you of disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. And while there may be no practical use in that, there is most certainly value.
Viimeiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Erotteluhuomautus
Julkaisutoimittajat
Kirjan kehujat
Alkuteoksen kieli
Kanoninen DDC/MDS
Kanoninen LCC

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Englanninkielinen Wikipedia

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"Aging sportswriter W.G. Karunasena's liver is shot. As his health fades, he embarks on a frantic search for missing cricketer Pradeep Mathew, whose virtuosic bowling was once legendary. En route he discovers a six-fingered coach, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and unsettling truths about his country and its beloved sport."--P. [4] of cover.

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