Collective memory is a great chisel of sports idols. Especially those whose supposed feats there is no more witness than oral tradition. As if magical realism took over the environment, the stories of the athlete in question travel in a mouth to a constant ear that adds details to the anecdotes. Unlikely plays, dream goals or phrases for history are incorporated into a biography that, on many occasions, has more to do with the desires of those who share it than with reality. Thus, each town, however, proudly shares the story of a footballer who was better than Maradona, Pele or Messi – sometimes, that the three together – but who, or because the circumstances did not accompany him, or simply because he did not win, he developed his entire career in the domestic sphere. Few people saw him play. Maybe that’s why that guy dried like nobody, scored goals with amazing ease and was also an exceptional person.
In the star and memory (impediment) the Argentine writer Eduardo Berti tells the story of Eliseo Alegre-“a supernatural talent that never flooring a stadium of First Division and which the newspapers of Buenos Aires never spoke. It was, for those who saw him play, the best footballer of all time”-. Berti offers an original, dynamic and fun narrative, in which family, childhood friends, teammates, rivals, journalists and even the biographer of Alegre are adding brushstrokes to a canvas in which the enigmatic figure of the footballer is emerging. A boy with an innate gift for something he didn’t like: football. That one day, with 17 years, she scores two goals to overcome a historical rival. And then it becomes a legend. And he does so many extraordinary things that the announcers end the exhausted games, even if the whole town was in the stadium and there was no one to whom to narrate the game on the radio. A novel that is read as a documentary and in which a tragic destination surveys each of the images created with words.
For more updates, visit our homepage: NewsTimesWire
