Since Leo Messi landed at the F.C. Barcelona as a thirteen year old boy, his dimension in football has grown to become the best player of all times. All the kids want to be Messi, his shirt is the best selling in every continent and the videos of his goals and plays are the most watched on YouTube. Leo Messi has made us very happy and these exercises in style are an attempt to round off and prolong this happiness. Jordi Puntí captures in words the beauty of his game, his hunger, the genius and the obsession of a football player that has been compared to Mozart or Picasso. His figure is at the center of each of these texts, from the first goals when he was a child in a Rosario field, to the way he fights for every ball, from the rivalry with Cristiano Ronaldo to the relationship with Barça's teammates, from his records and individual awards to his ability to repeat historical goals. Messi is also a 21st century artist, and embodies the predictions that Italo Calvino sketched for this millennium: lightness, speed, accuracy, visibility and multiplicity. With a playful, sentimental and analytical prose, Puntí makes us revive the privilege of seeing Messi at play, but we are also looking forward to the intrigues of the future. Will 2018 be his great year with FC Barcelona and Argentina? As national coach Jorge Sampaoli says, "Football owes him a World Cup". And there are still more questions: how will football be when Messi retires? How will we be, after Messi?
Author
Jordi Puntí is a writer, translator (Paul Auster, Amélie Nothomb and Daniel Pennac, among others), and a regular contributor to the Spanish and Catalan press. He is currently the editor of the literary supplement, Quadern, published by the newspaper El País. Puntí is considered one of the most promising new voices of contemporary Catalan literature. In 1998 he published his first book of short stories, Pell d’armadillo (Proa, 1998) that won the Serra d’Or Critics’ Prize. Lost Luggage is his first novel.
