Soccer, for me, has always represented a coming together: of geography,
of bodies, of language. It is, arguably, the most universal game, and it
unites moods and sensibilities. A player glides along the pitch keeping
the ball close—a precious jewel protected from its violent fate. In one
moment, the game seems soft and romantic; in the next, an opposing
player comes crashing in, all legs, sending the ball careening loose
along the green while the attacking player leans sideways, like a
windswept tree, on the ground. This is the edge that soccer dances on:
sometimes poetry, sometimes a brutal and unforgiving prose.

The last World Cup, in 2014, was, for me, the backdrop to an uprooting.
That summer, as I prepared to leave my beloved home town of Columbus,
Ohio, for the East Coast, I spent my time in front of a television
watching the beautiful game. It was, briefly, the World Cup of
underdogs. Colombia and James Rodríguez unexpectedly charging to the top
of their group; Costa Rica and Uruguay toppling once-greats Italy and
England in their group. And, of course, the United States, climbing out
of what was known as the “group of death” in breathtaking fashion, reached the Round of Sixteen, where the Americans went up against Belgium. On the day of that match, which was filled with the goalkeeping heroics
of the American Tim Howard, I was at a bar with friends, too nervous to
eat or drink anything, cheering for the national team. Twelve days
later, the gold-medal game between Germany and Argentina coincided with
my last day in Ohio. At my goodbye party, my friends and I squeezed into
a few restaurant booths in north Columbus and talked about the summer’s
slipping away, and my slipping away with it. This, even before that day,
is what the end of the World Cup signalled: the close of a glorious
season inside a season. Even though the tournament ended in somewhat
expected fashion, with Germany defeating Argentina, 1—0, on a goal from
Mario Götze in extra time, it felt like the summer of underdogs making
good, for a moment.

Earlier this year, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published “Home and Away:
Writing the Beautiful Game,” a book of letters exchanged between Karl
Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund during the 2014 World Cup. Ekelund, a
Swedish author of more than a dozen books ranging from poetry to novels,
corresponds from Rio, where he watches the matches up close; Knausgaard,
the more famous of the two, watches the games on television from his
home in Sweden. The two met while attending a pickup soccer game in
Malmö, Sweden, and have been friends since. They shared the city—Ekelund
as a native and the Norwegian Knausgaard as a transplant—and maintained
a friendship by using soccer as a vehicle to discuss everything else.
Through their correspondence, the game becomes an entry point to explore
their lives, their politics, their families.

Ekelund has an affinity for a more freewheeling and high-scoring style
of the game, which is reflected in both his prose style, beautiful yet
frantic, and his constant wish for excitement. When writing about the
aforementioned Belgium-vs.-U.S. match, he bemoans the final score.
“Belgium could’ve won 5–1,” he laments. “That they didn’t shows their
only real weakness: a lack of nerve in the box.” He is the type of fan
who would prefer a team to double down in its intensity of attack, even if
it means humiliating an opponent. It’s not that Ekelund is unkind;
rather, he seems uninterested in mercy in a setting where emotions, not
lives, are at stake.

Knausgaard, by contrast, prefers a style of soccer that highlights
“efficiency, pain, and suffering.” He is more interested in the minutiae
of the game than the grander narratives. He is also interested in the
minutiae of life: he frequently slips into tales about his family that
go on for pages before he says anything about soccer. In one letter, he
tells a tender story about his daughters playing on a beach in the
morning, which spills into a tender story about visiting his friend on a
hill, which spills into a dramatic play-by-play writing of a Germany-vs.-Algeria match, written as if he were calling the game himself (“Another
chance for Germany!” “Germany with a two-on-one!”). It feels intimate,
un-self-conscious.

Ekelund, who wrote the book “Samba Football,” a history of flamboyance
in Brazilian soccer, in 2002, uses the game as a vehicle to enter life,
as opposed to using life as a vehicle to enter the game. He fills the
letters with the adornments of the World Cup and the atmosphere
surrounding it. In one letter, he recounts a pickup game he jumped into
with Brazilian kids on a side pitch in São Paulo, detailing a moment
when a young phenom was berated by a much older player “in terms so
terrible and words so vulgar that I can’t commit them to print.” In
another, he describes Germany beating Brazil 7–1, thwarting a chance for
a Brazil-vs.-Argentina final, by writing, “Yesterday a large dark cloud
appeared in the World Cup sky, our—your and my—‘heaven’ and our dream of
a final between Brazil and Argentina, and that cloud says a lot about my
naivety.” Ekelund lets the game entrance him, and allows the passion
that it ignites work its temporary magic.

The world itself does not stop for this. In the spring of 2014, Vladimir
Putin and the Russian government annexed Crimea; a few months later, the
Islamic State seized control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. “Late
last night I read that they have proclaimed a new Caliphate,” Knausgaard
writes. He often wonders what it takes for an individual to navigate
modern society, and here he allows himself some philosophizing. In my
favorite of his letters, toward the end of the book, Knausgaard talks
about his first overwhelming trip to Los Angeles: “The army culture, the
weapon culture, illiteracy, everything is about the visual image now,”
he writes, before coming to his conclusion: “There is a big cultural
decline in America. This is tangential to what you write, Fredrik, about
things getting better.”

It becomes increasingly clear that the ways in which the two men view
the world align directly with their ways of looking at the game. Ekelund
is optimistic, eager to see magnificence explode out of moments that
others might find mundane. Knausgaard, technical and brooding, focusses
on the slow dissection of an instant, rather than its potentially more
thrilling outcome. This insight is the book’s greatest gift: by the end,
you realize, if you are in love with soccer, that your way of loving it
must also speak to the way you love the world and all of its
complications.

Reading the book, I often circled back to the idea of distance. For two
years, I watched my home-town team, Columbus Crew S.C., from New Haven,
Connecticut, alone. There was no bar where I could watch those games,
nor any friends nearby who cared about them. At its core, “Home and
Away” is a story about two men doing what they can to keep a friendship
afloat, even from continents away. There are times when the book drags or
meanders. But there’s a truth in that, too. The joy of friendship
depends on tedium, on companionship during boredom and exhaustion and
what would otherwise be simple loneliness.

In the book’s final letter, Ekelund narrates the World Cup final to
Knausgaard, from the opening whistle to the celebration. As the letter
winds down, Ekelund lays out a dream-like sequence from the future.
Twenty-six years from the night of the final game, a
twenty-five-year-old man asks his parents how they met. The two imagined
parents tell their imagined son about a night in Brazil, when they
locked eyes during the madness of a celebration spilling from the
Estádio do Maracanã, in Rio de Janeiro. Their gaze leads to a kiss,
which leads to them falling in love, and later to a child who grows into
a man and asks about that magical night. It is a warm and heartbreaking
close to the book; Ekelund is overcome with longing, a desire to make
his feeling inside of the World Cup last forever—to extend the
beautiful game and the dear friendship that comes with it.