28 Sep 2013 08:01:15
Everybody in the sense of everybody who likes table tennis, which means practically everybody on the planet – a planet, which, according to this book, is no more than a big ping-pong ball spinning its way through space. Bet you've never thought of the world like that before. Oh you have? Well, you've never expressed it with the Carl Sagan-meets-Desmond Douglas solemnity of Guido Mina di Sospiro.
Actually, thinking about it, seen from space, Earth looks more like a marble than a ping-pong ball, so perhaps a book about marbles would have been an even cooler idea. It's the full moon that looks like a ping-pong ball, but if the spinning ball is our moon where does that leave us? Living on the wrong planet for starters. Except all of the top table-tennis players do live here, many of them in China, a country and culture from which – I'm back to summarising Mina di Sospiro now – westerners hogtied by pre-quantum ideas of causality could learn a trick or two. There are also, he counsels, useful things to be learned from non-Euclidean geometry, chaos theory and Huizinga's notion of Homo ludens, man the player. Personally, I prefer the idea of Homo canine, man the dog, which means that if you keep hitting or throwing a ball I'll keep chasing after it and trying to get it back, and while I'm doing that my tail will be wagging and I won't think of anything else, like having to go back to reading this witless little book.
Table tennis, for Mina di Sospiro, is all about spin. You might think you're a strong player because you can belt the ball reliably back and forth, but you won't get it back because Mina di Sospiro will have put so much spin on it. Spin makes it hard to tell how and where the ball will bounce, makes everything Heisenbergianly unpredictable. And remember the match-winning point of the book: what we discover about spin in ping-pong can be found in "other fields too". Not in Mina di Sospiro's writing though. His prose is so lacking in spin and bounce the half-awake reader can see where a sentence is headed before it's left the author's pen. Defeats are taken "with a grain of salt", the aromas of Chinese food are "mouthwatering", a friend has a "smile like the Cheshire cat".
Hang on a minute though. Cunning players sometimes look like they're spinning the ball while actually hitting it flat. So when Mina di Sospiro writes that he jumped "from the frying pan into the fire" he could be wrong-footing us. And while we might think that "in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king" is not the kind of metaphysics promised by the title, that's because this homely truth has disguised itself as a cliche when it's really a … banality! Or perhaps it's just that his grasp of the English language – in ping-pongese, his pen-holder grip – is a little uncertain. A master of "cross-fertilised" shots, Mina di Sospiro has a fondness for cross-fertilised grammar: "If one puts his mind to it, he can accomplish anything." Or how about the spinning redundancy of "this increasingly more interconnected world"? I assumed these gaucheries were his but in the acknowledgements he thanks his "co‑author Joscelyn Godwin". Is JC the unspun hero (his name appears nowhere on the title pages) who, incredible though this sounds, improved the text? Or translated it, even? Were they some kind of doubles team?
Sizing up new opponents Mina di Sospiro takes stock of the kind of paddle they're using and what they're wearing. He himself hits the page in an ill-fitting combo of stuffed shirt and tie-dye. After beating a guy at a very rough club – "Many were the balls that I sent flying past him" – and narrowly escaping with his life, Mina di Sospiro "repaired to his study" where reading Jung brought to mind an incident from his high-school years. He'd been confronted by five guys threatening him with iron bars who, while leaving his head intact, "didn't leave without acquainting my ribs with one of their bars". This from the self-styled "western dude" who "could eat a whole chicken, and then some".
One would view him more charitably were he not, whether in the midst of matches or in the privacy of his study, so grand. And then some. Convinced that he has subtly "philosophised" and "psychologised", quick to announce his superiority over co-visitors to China so busy with their cameras that they failed to "get the picture my wife and I were getting", he reserves his loftiest contempt for "parasitic" players who don't appreciate that the pursuit of true form is more important than winning. How he loves thrashing them! Needless to say, although we are often told that he makes people laugh "hysterically", Mina di Sospiro the writer is incapable of comedy. The account of how he accidentally drives up to the CIA headquarters at Langley – he's tired after a match – is a masterclass in enhanced laughter avoidance techniques.
Still, we are grateful to him for bringing to our attention stuff we didn't know. That China, for example, is the world's biggest producer of tomatoes and potatoes. This sets up a question: "What on earth do they do with 50m tons of tomatoes and 80m tons of potatoes?" Well, at a guess, I'd say they export them. We also learn that when a "busy professional" – Mina di Sospiro loves his "successful professionals" and "distinguished" economists – dashes out to play ping-pong, it could be read as sneaky cover for having an affair. "But such TT-playing professionals are neither bent on anything illicit nor satisfying a sexual urge …" Because, we've just been told, they're playing ping-pong! Versions of this – a kind of linguistic and logical tailspin that lands us straight back where we started – crop up throughout the book: "To say that Von Clausewitz was Prussian rather than Chinese may suffice to describe his difference in mindset, but would be an oversimplification." Whereas "the sad reality that many children in developing countries grow up in underprivileged conditions, if not in outright misery" is to view the world in its increasingly more interconnected complexity, right?
