Open - A. Agassi

Are these Lesenotizen the written equivalent of a reaction video? Then I should stop.

There is this pasticceria I really liked in Freiburg where I always went with my parent. All the mignons are very pretty and tasty and everything is well decorated and they really care about details and then somebody told me it’s just a retail chain, there are several of these shops and they all look like that, in the morning the vans go through with a thousand pasticcini all copies of one another through a thousand (no, I guess less) shops all copies of one another. I never checked if that was true and of course never told my parents, because it would break the magic and all in all it might be true, but it might also be false, I just do not know. But for this book it is really hard not to notice.

So, I think this thing was structured by people in a suit. One person who wrote the book (mentioned in the acknowledgements but not on the cover - they said it was his choice - is it true or is it good for marketing or both?) and then five project managers and Agassi that sometime came in, looked at a sentence and gave an opinion, then left. The author and Agassi were allowed not to wear a suit, but I think the author had to wear a shirt. I respect this book as a successful project, not as a work of art - like the industrial pasticcini, it is a good industrial work if they look and taste juuust perfect. It’s just not home cooked, and maybe that’s at the end not even important.

So it’s a perfectly polished book, which is what gives it away. Constantly presenting the protagonist as an underdog must follow from the consideration that is easier to grow passionate about a storia di riscatto, somebody fighting against everything and everyone and then finally succeeding. So this is the frame which is repeatedly used. The heavy framing is a problem. This is not somebody telling about their life, this is a posteriori rationalization of a life, which is an intellectual crime. Everything can be coded as a pair of events: two thing happenings one after the other and the first foreshadows the second; something like the guy is on a safari on a jeep for a tournament in South Africa and a lion almost jumps on the jeep and devours him but he gets away, then he goes on the tournament the day after and almost loses to a guy but at the very end manages to win the match, and the chapter then invariably closes with short sentences for effect, like “Going to the net I looked at him. His long hair. He looked like a lion.” Sipario, new chapter and the same thing again, it is precooked. It’s just the same recipe all over.

(I made up the thing with the lion. A lion does appear at some point.)

The good news is that it works. The people in a suit asked somebody to read all the books to determine what humans like and then decided to write a book in a style that humans like, so all good.

I liked this fuck-you-in-particular extract about Stuttgart:

One month later I’m in Stuttgart for the start of the indoor season. If I were to list all the places in the world where I don’t want to be, all the continents and countries, the cities and towns, the villages and hamlets and burgs, Stuttgart would be on the top of my list. If I live to be a thousand years old, I think, nothing good is ever going to happen to me in Stuttgart.

Maybe one of the people in the suit came from Freiburg. I had noted other quotes, but they all look cliche now that I read them again.

I was sure I would like this book, because I like biographies, I read it and I liked it a lot. Good human!