Books Blog)
Protests from writers including Salman Rushdie, Günter Grass, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen against the "choke hold" President Putin's anti-gay and blasphemy laws place on freedom of expression have been timed to coincide with the opening of the Sochi Winter Olympics. But that this is a political, not a sporting, objection is evident from the surprisingly long and fruitful relationship between literature and winter sports.
Robert Burns – curling
"Tam Samson's Elegy" is about a curler, using curling jargon in its fifth stanza. Debate continues to rage as to whether Burns himself curled.
Louisa May Alcott – speed skating
In Little Women, Laurie and Jo race on a frozen river, ignoring Amy who falls through the ice.
Edith Wharton – luge
Ethan Frome, Wharton's weirdest novel, climaxes in what Ethan and Mattie plan as a double suicide as they hurtle down a hill on a sleigh.
TS Eliot – bobsleigh
"... he took me out on a sled, / And I was frightened. He said, Marie,/ Marie, hold on tight. And down we/ went" (The Waste Land). An Austrian countess's pre-war memory images the German-speaking world's self-destructive plunge.
Agatha Christie – cross-country skiing
In The Sittaford Mystery the key to the case is a middle-aged major being able to ski six miles in 10 minutes on a gentle incline – a feat even an Olympian would find testing.
Ian Fleming – slalom, biathlon, skeleton
All in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, where Blofeld is based in the Alps. In the climax Bond pursues him on a skeleton bob, descending at 40mph-plus. The national icon's excellence on the flimsy one-man bob nicely foreshadows the run of medals in the one winter sport where Britain has been consistently successful.
Alan Clark – super-G
Each year in the Diaries, January finds Clark (who mimicked the 007 lifestyle in this and other respects) at his chalet in Zermatt, where he was an exuberantly daredevil, but oddly not very good skier.
James Salter – downhill
Salter's screenplay for the Robert Redford vehicle Downhill Racer, adapting an Oakley Hall novel, reflected the action man credentials of the former pilot, who has also written non-fiction about skiing. The sport is also at the heart of Louise Mensch's (aka Bagshawe's) bonkbuster Tall Poppies and Rachel Johnson's Winter Games.
Don DeLillo – ice hockey
Co-written by DeLillo using the pen name Cleo Birdwell (and since disowned), Amazons imagines a pioneering female NHL player. The critic Keith Gessen has nevertheless argued that "the great American hockey novel" has yet to be written.
Roberto Bolaño – figure skating
The Skating Rink, Bolaño's improbable debut, imagines a lovely Spanish pro skater, Nuria, having a rink built for her by a besotted bureaucrat after she fails to make the Olympics squad. Skating can also be found (as John Mullan's 10 of the Best noted) in The Prelude, The Pickwick Papers, Anna Karenina, The Catcher in the Rye and poems by EE Cummings and Margaret Atwood.
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