The Soccer War Read online

  We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness. We know its configuration, but there is no way to make it accessible to others. It will never be right. Something, the most important thing, the most significant thing, something remains unsaid.

  Relate one year of my country—it does not matter which one: let us say, 1957. And one month of that year—say, July. And just one day—let us say, the sixth.

  No.

  Yet that day, that month, that year exist in us, somehow, because we were there, walking that street, or digging coal, or cutting the forest, and if we were walking along that street how can we then describe it (it could be Kraków) so that you can see its movement, its climate, its persistence and changeability, its smell and its hum?

  They cannot see it. You cannot see it, anything, the night, Mpango, the thick bush, Ghana, the fire dying out, the elders going off to sleep, the Nana dozing, and snow falling somewhere, and women like blacks, thoughts, ‘They are learning to read, he said something like that,’ thoughts, ‘They had a war, ach, a war, he said, yes, no colonies, that country, Poland, white and they have no colonies,’ thoughts, the bush screams, this strange world.

  From

  RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI

  Travels with Herodotus

  An intimate account of the legendary reporter’s first forays into the world beyond the iron curtain.

  Available June 2007 in hardcover from Knopf

  $25.00/ $32.00 CAN • 978-1-4000-4338-5

  PLEASE VISIT WWW.AAKNOPF.COM

  * * *

  Selected titles by Ryszard Kapuściński, available in Vintage paperback:

  The Emperor • 978-0-679-72203-8

  Imperium • 978-0-679-74780-2

  The Shadow of the Sun • 978-0-679-77907-0

  Shah of Shahs • 978-0-679-73801-5

  The Soccer War • 978-0-679-73805-3

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

  TIME’S ARROW

  by Martin Amis

  Dr. Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home, in this ingenious novel that not only rethinks history but dreastically revises our notion of time itself.

  “Splendid … bold…Time’s Arrow is Martin Amis’s most thrilling book … gripping from start to finish.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-73572-0

  FLAUBERT’S PARROT

  by Julian Barnes

  An elegant work of literary imagination involving a cranky amateur scholar’s obsessive search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert’s Parrot also investigates the obsession of the detective, whose passion for the page is fed by personal bitterness—and whose life seems oddly to mirror those of Flaubert’s characters.

  “A high literary entertainment carried off with great brio … rich in parody and parrotry, full of insight and wit … a great success.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-73136-9

  POSSESSION

  by A. S. Byatt

  An intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.

  “A masterpiece of wordplay and adventure, a novel that compares with Stendhal and Joyce.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  Winner of the Booker Prize

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-73590-9

  THE STRANGER

  by Albert Camus

  Through the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder, Camus explores what he termed “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-72020-0

  IN COLD BLOOD

  by Truman Capote

  As Capote reconstructs the 1959 murder of a Kansas farm family and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. The resulting work transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.

  “A masterpiece … a spellbinding work.”

  —Life

  Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-74558-0

  INVISIBLE MAN

  by Ralph Ellison

  This searing record of a black man’s journey through contemporary America reveals, in Ralph Ellison’s words, “the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class, color and region.”

  “The greatest American novel in the second half of the twentieth century … the classic representation of American black experience.”

  —R.W. B. Lewis

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-72313-7

  THE SOUND AND THE FURY

  by William Faulkner

  The tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant.

  “For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner’s works] are without equal in our time and country.”

  —Robert Penn Warren

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-73224-1

  THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

  by Kazuo Ishiguro

  A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England.

  “One of the best books of the year.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-73172-5

  THE WOMAN WARRIOR

  by Maxine Hong Kingston

  “A remarkable book … As an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course, it is anti-nostalgic; it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the ‘female avenger’—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.”

  —The New York Times

  Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-72188-6

  BUDDENBROOKS

  THE DECLINE OF A FAMILY

  by Thomas Mann

  Thomas Mann’s first novel, published when he was only twenty-five, is an utterly absorbing chronicle of four generations of a German mercantile family. This acclaimed new English version by the award-winning translator John E. Woods deftly conveys the tonal variety, vigorous wordplay, and unfettered humor that previous translations missed.

  “Wonderfully fresh and elegant … bound to become the definitive English version.… Essential reading for anybody who wishes to enter Mann’s fictional universe.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-75260-9

  ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

  by Cormac McCarthy

  At sixteen, John Grady Cole finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

  “A book of remarkable beauty and strength, the work of a master in perfect command of his medium.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-74439-8

  THE CEMENT GARDEN

  by Ian McEwan

  Out of the blasphemous wishes and hair-raising games of four children alone in a world without parents or teachers, Ian McEwan constructs a novel that is all the more chilling for its offhand approach to the unspeakable.

  “A writer of uncanny power.”

  —Time

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-75018-5

  A RIVER SUTRA

  by Gita Mehta

  Set by India’s Narmada River, whose banks are said to contain four hundred billion sacred places, and inhabited by characters including naked ascetics and ecsta
tic singers, a millionaire monk and an erotically possessed businessman, A River Sutra combines Indian storytelling traditions with thoroughly modern perceptions into the nature of love—love both carnal and sublime, treacherous and redeeming.

  “Enchanting … sometimes comic, sometimes tragic and always filled with insights.… A delight, bringing to Western readers the mystery and drama of a rich cultural heritage.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-75247-1

  LOLITA

  by Vladimir Nabokov

  The famous and controversial novel that tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.

  “The only convincing love story of our century.”

  —Vanity Fair

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-72316-1

  THE ENGLISH PATIENT

  by Michael Ondaatje

  During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion, recollection and observation is woven, leaving them inextricably connected by the brutal, improbable circumstances of war.

  “It seduces and beguiles us with its many-layered mysteries, its brilliantly taut and lyrical prose, its tender regard for its characters.”

  —Newsday

  Winner of the Booker Prize

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-74520-3

  OPERATION SHYLOCK

  by Philip Roth

  In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, and it is up to Roth to stop him—even if that means impersonating his impersonator.

  “A diabolically clever, engaging work … Roth is so splendidly convincing … that the result is a kind of dizzying exhilaration.”

  —Boston Globe

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-75029-0

  THE PASSION

  by Jeanette Winterson

  Intertwining the destinies of two remarkable people—the soldier Henri, for eight years Napoleon’s faithful cook, and Villanelle, the red-haired daughter of a Venetian boatman—The Passion is “a deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so” (The New York Times Book Review).

  Fiction/Literature/0-679-72437-0

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

  * * *

  AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE, OR CALL TOLL-FREE TO ORDER: 1-800-793-2665 (CREDIT CARDS ONLY).

  * * *