Novel in which the modernist movement is imagined as a tennis tournament in Paris.
From the blurb:
Take your seats for the most unusual tennis tournament in the history of the world. Paris has gone crazy, flags and banners are everywhere. Every hotel is booked out. Queues at the stadium are huge, and the worldwide television audience is tipped to be in the billions.
Each nation is fielding its great names: the American team boasts Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Amelia Earhardt and many others, while British stars include PG Wodehouse, Enid Blyton and James Joyce. ‘Supertom’ Eliot is in sadly indifferent form, ‘Because I did not serve too well/ Because I did not serve’. Groucho Marx confuses Heidegger – ‘By the third set Marx was running around his backhand. By the fourth set he was running around his accountant. He was trying to get his accountant to run around his backhand when the match finished.’ You’ve never seen anything like it.
Praise for the novel:
‘What Peter Ustinov once did for Grand Prix motor racing, The Tournament does for tennis and world culture combined’ – Clive James.
‘Australia’s best humourist.’ Barry Humphries.
‘A brilliant comic mind.’ Ben Elton.
‘Take a seat in the bleachers and enjoy his mastery of the sporting cliche and his unerring satirical skills. and if his satires are deadly, his parodies are simply unplayable.’ Australian.
‘A tournament that pits some of the great creative artists, thinkers, wits, polemicists and celebrities of roughly the past hundred years against each other at the notionally sporting, but sometimes bruising, art of tennis, allows Clarke marvellous latitude for his brilliant satirical wit, his love of the one-liner and his unerring nose for literary parody… Game, set, match and championship: J. Clarke.“ Australian Book Review.
‘A brilliant invention from a national treasure.’ Daily Telegraph.
‘John Clarke [is] the funniest man in Australia I reckon.’ Howard Jacobson.
‘Clarke has created a convincing alternative universe. At the beginning, the reader wonders how good Einstein would have been on his backhand side. By the end, the reader wonders whether Lleyton Hewitt would be any good at relativity’. – Clive James.