Life as a series of vignettes alluding to no real development, until you can sit and reflect, is an amazing way of living.

If you object to books in which not much happens, this is not for you (though if you want happening, read the news). Nice people try hard and things get a bit better. Hession’s project, across both books, is admirable and interesting: are goodness and kindness in ordinary life enough to sustain a novel? It’s obvious that the answer should be yes, and in Leonard and Hungry Paul it was. Tom Bryant (31 October 2007). "Football - Knowledge: the footballers who have moves named after them". the Guardian. Archived from the original on 21 December 2016 . Retrieved 12 December 2016.Andrea Pirlo explains THAT Panenka penalty which bamboozled Joe Hart at Euro 2012". The Mirror. 15 April 2014. Archived from the original on 14 January 2018 . Retrieved 4 April 2018. In football, a penalty technique in which the taker chips the ball artfully into the centre of the goal, counting on the likelihood that the goalkeeper will have dived to either side’ I found Panenka harder going; a lot depends on the reader’s understanding of and sympathy for a man permanently affected by failure on the football pitch. Hession has done his work so that you don’t have to like or understand football to follow the story, but if you’re immune to the appeal of team sports, a lot of imaginative work is required. Many have tried to emulate this down the years - some with success, but when a Panenka goes wrong it goes very wrong. Notably in May 2021 when the great Sergio Aguero had the chance to put his team 2-0 up and likely clinch the Premier League title for Manchester City:

Germany are famously kings of the penalty shoot out - or rather elfmeterschießen - having won their last 6 in major tournaments, 4 at World Cups and 2 at the Euros ( https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/deuts...) including twice against England. But their first major elfmeterschießen, and the only one in a final, was in 1976 when West Germany faced Czechoslovakia. The first 7 penalties were all scored, but Uli Hoeneß missed the eighth. That left Antonín Panenka with a chance to win the game - and the composed, almost poetic, penalty he took was such a surprise to both Sepp Maier in the German goal and to the watching millions, that it is, 45 years later, still called after him: a Panenka. His name was Joseph, but for years they had called him Panenka, a name that was his sadness and his story.”Part of why I enjoy Hession’s books so much is that they’re unashamedly kind and optimistic when literary fashion often veers towards the dark and nihilistic. He puts this down to a couple of influences. “Leonard and Hungry Paul in particular, is heavily influenced by coming out of a decade of reading children’s books for my kids,” he says. “What children’s books do a bit better than other fiction is they try to go beyond just saying ‘the world is a bad place’… They try and say, ‘Is there a way to be in the world, given the world is the way it is? How do I engage with the world without it overwhelming me?’… That’s something I think of in my own life and it comes out in the book.” This novel is set in an the unfashionable town of Seneca in an unnamed country – the town and team’s name representing the stoicism that underlies the novel. Panenka, his next book, has football in it. It’s a moving story about a retired footballer grappling with a sense of failure. What inspired it? “I remember reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee,” he says. “Disgrace is a really interesting topic and it didn’t really deal with it in a way that I was expecting… Also, I had read an interview with Daniel Timofte, the guy who lost a penalty against Ireland for Romania… He hadn’t got over it. And people hadn’t let him get over it. And though he was a very talented footballer it was still the thing he was known for. The main theme of that book is life’s unfixability. I think our mentality at times is trying to fix the things in our life to allow us to move on to try and say, well, how can you move on if they’re not fixable?” Unashamedly optimistic We currently find him at 50 as he tries to rebuild his life with his estranged daughter and a new relationship while suffering from crippling headaches he refers to as the Iron Mask. This is a sad story as we not only follow Panenka but other characters as we see everyone live with the difficulties of life. I just love the way Rónán Hession manages to take small details and make them a joy to read; there’s one scene where Panenka is having his hair cut and the small touches such as running fingers through the hair makes something so simple into a magical act. In another scene Marie-Therese has lunch with her colleagues and we readers see the casual sexism that one can find in society. All these touches are subtle but add power, in fact, something important follows which means the details have their important role.