This is a special case, as I listened to this book, read by the author in a series of TV broadcasts produced in connection with its publication. I was inspired to approach Gustafsson’s writing when I heard of the death of one of his collaborators, Jan Myrdal. The Tennis Players is about a Swedish professor of literature guest lecturing at the University of Texas and his incessant tennis playing. It is a short book, dealing a lot with differences between the US and Europe, and ideas the one has about the other. Me, having lived on both sides, figured it would be an interesting topic. It turned out to be mostly about American ideas of Europe, rather than the other way around. The main character is a lecturer on Strindberg, and one of the story lines is that an American student of his has found evidence that would revolutionize the world of Strindberg research. Our lecturer ends up withholding this evidence to the community of Strindberg researchers, much to his student’s chagrin.
Another line in the book is the constant tennis playing, both in rich country clubs and in humbler areas, where he meets different people and learn of their philosophy of playing. It seems that Gustafsson uses the game of tennis as a metaphor for life in general (much like the management book “The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Gallwey, incidentally published 1972). Myrdal was married to literary critic Madeleine Gustafsson, but divorced her to marry a woman he met in Texas, with whom he had two children. Later he married a third woman, before he passed away in 2016.
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Kinship of all Species 