Unusual tale of universal hopes and dreams

EAMON DELANEYreviews World Cup Wishesby Eshkol Nevo Translated by Sondra Silverston Chatto Windus, 346pp, £12.99

DESPITE ITS title, this is not actually another book about football. Instead, it’s a strong and compelling novel about four close friends and their intertwined lives over the period of many years, and how they reflect upon it.

They do so through the idea that every time the World Cup comes around, they will write down their wishes for the next few years, hide them somewhere and, during the next final, four years later, they will take them out and see how many of the ambitions they have managed to fulfil.

In a sense, the novel didn’t need this construct and reading it, one often forgets about these wishes. The novel could just as easily have been called The Group or The Gang, and proceed just as successfully.

The story is set in contemporary Israel, mostly in the coastal cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv and it is all the fresher for that. Given the jaded quality of much new metropolitan fiction from the UK or US, it is to such different climes and languages – India, modern Africa – that we now look for new insights into the human narrative and the interaction of personalities.

The novel is translated from modern Hebrew and reflects that language’s direct and muscular style, although such is the precision of the English phrasing, that it is hard to believe it is a translation. The central narrator, Yuval Freed, is himself an Israeli of English background and thus complains of the inhibitions, as he sees it, of his Anglo-Saxon heritage.

A bittersweet melancholy hangs over the story, which is only partly connected to the obvious fraught political situation of modern Israel, although the conflict intrudes in a sidelong and crucial way – “it seeps inside you” as one of them puts it – with the second Intifada occurring during the course of the story.

After bruising army stints in the occupied territories, the characters feel detached and helpless about changing the political situation, much like the characters in the recent acclaimed Israeli animation movie, Waltz with Bashir.

However, the melancholy of the book is actually of a more universal nature, addressing those fundamental questions of young friends everywhere about the course of their lives and their ability to fulfil the hopes and aspirations they set themselves.

The main story here is the feeling of betrayal on the part of Yuval, that just after he meets and falls in love with the enigmatic Ya’ara, she goes off with Churchill, the alpha male of the group. Another character, the dreamy Ofir, travels India to escape it all and returns with Maria, a Danish woman, and her teenage daughter. Inevitably, the story has some dramatic and even tragic turns.

The novel has echoes of Nick Hornby but what it more satisfyingly reminded me of was the wonderful novels of Geoff Dyer, such as The Colour of Memory and Paris Trance, which leave a resonance long after you have finished them.

There is an integrity to the narrative which goes straight to the heart of the human condition, especially in a group dynamic among passionate, self- questioning participants. Perhaps this is a Jewish quality but it is also a universal impulse and it is this which makes the book so compelling, readable, unusual, as well as both sad and affirmative.

Eamon Delaney is a journalist and author. His most recent book, Breaking the Mould: A Story of Art and Ireland, was published last year (New Island)