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A review by jmiae
The Longshot by Katie Kitamura
3.0
What is the appeal of professional fighting, specifically for the fighters? Why do they put their bodies through that kind of abuse and risk serious brain damage, or even death?
The fascinating thing about The Longshot is I often felt that Cal and Riley, respectively the fighter and the manager, were asking themselves the same questions or at least variations of them. This is written so tightly that there is little room for sentimentality and yet the rawness of the prose describing the inner thoughts of both main characters, followed by intense physicality of the story's climax, was actually quite an emotional experience.
I have two interpretations of this book:
One: In the end, it seems that if you do something long enough you forget why you were doing it but you keep doing it anyway because you don't know what else you can do. You just get swept up in the current of time.
Two: the famous menopause monologue from the fabulous second season of Fleabag comes to mind:
"Women are born with pain built in. It's our physical destiny. Period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don't. They have to seek it out.
They invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we also do very well on our own. And then they create wars, so they can feel things and touch each other, and when there aren't any wars they can play rugby."
Or in this case, they get into mixed martial arts.
The fascinating thing about The Longshot is I often felt that Cal and Riley, respectively the fighter and the manager, were asking themselves the same questions or at least variations of them. This is written so tightly that there is little room for sentimentality and yet the rawness of the prose describing the inner thoughts of both main characters, followed by intense physicality of the story's climax, was actually quite an emotional experience.
I have two interpretations of this book:
One: In the end, it seems that if you do something long enough you forget why you were doing it but you keep doing it anyway because you don't know what else you can do. You just get swept up in the current of time.
Two: the famous menopause monologue from the fabulous second season of Fleabag comes to mind:
"Women are born with pain built in. It's our physical destiny. Period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don't. They have to seek it out.
They invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we also do very well on our own. And then they create wars, so they can feel things and touch each other, and when there aren't any wars they can play rugby."
Or in this case, they get into mixed martial arts.