As a correspondence these two men have made a safe space for themselves to ramble on about football. Sometimes that rambling is engaging like a good pub discussion but mostly it's banal & rather frequently unapologetically chauvinist & racist.

Knausgaard is the Jonathan Franzen of Europe. His sexism is so casual. I suppose I shouldn't expect less from a writer whose success is predicated on mansplaining 'not all men' over 3600 pages. Ekelund balances this with a fervent distaste or fetishization of any race/religion outside his own. His is the sad bigotry of the Enlightenment white man.

All of this made the tiny gems about football too few to warrant the effort. A profoundly disappointing book