Sheena Patel offers 'soc fans' the radical idea that anyone can be as mediocre as white people

Costa doesn’t think about Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s monologue Bag of fleas (2013) every time the narrator of football fan (2022) above the mouth. The two protagonists are aggravated by imperfection, questionable morality and unfiltered confession: they are anti-heroines of the 21st century, totally new archetypes who sense the formation of a feminist, or postcolonial (in the case of football fan), mai no se’ns haurien appear in a literary work.

In Sheena Patel’s debut novel, in time with a narrator in his thirties, a group of immigrants, precarious by the demands of the cultural industry. The new personal life is just as good as the new work life: he’s a younger guy who in his heart hates (because he doesn’t want to fuck but loves) as he leaves a house that steals his pants and raises his hopes, but (who predicted?) he’s just decided for her. As the sun passes, the frustrating pattern leads the narrator to the most sexual limerència (like Dant’s with Beatriu, but with the omnipresence of the characters). Unusually, the mania here leads her to become obsessed with each other of her six lovers. He follows them day and night (the translator, Elena Ordeig Vila, has now been forced to advance to the DIEC and talk about complaints) and gets angry with her because she is rich, a nepo girl with millions of followers who are now in her face because she started the course in an advantageous position. Among the other privileges there is also the white one: in one of the six stories he buys a very expensive steak and rolled salpebra at a dramatic price; The comments show great concern for the sacrifice of this drapery, which makes the protagonist see that white people are very “empathetic towards everyone, which does not match these real human beings with high melanin indices.”

TO football fanwe recognize the petits and large mistreatments of certain love relationships (“I sent an email asking when we will see each other again and when I will consult the agenda”), but above all we confirm that relationships are unbalanced by age, class, race and design. With her platonic lover, the narrator discovers the pinnacle of racist perversity (“Em diu que li gusta que el vegin en públic amb mi, el que vol dir és que li fatò que el meu color de pell diu dell’a la gente”) and, obviously, li venen rampells Tolstoianos: “El món està fet per a les parelles. Fins i tot les unfortunates”. The protagonist is not only accused of the abuse of a perverse narcissist and a contrary racist, but is also accused of the “second generation immigrants” accused of granting them the privilege of personal fulfillment, in the name of culture, denied to their peers.

All the chapters are short and I read the words, the novel is read in three words. And what do we have in the end? Lots of trouble and a hostile protagonist (Bag of fleasremember) that we save because the people around us are pitjor or because, with an effort of anti-racist radicalism, we accept the rights of BIPOC so as not to have to double our performance or justify the same value at all times. Patel then raises the radical idea that anyone can be just as mediocre as white people.