The Rider
A literary sports classic, finally available in the U.S.Originally published in Holland in 1978, The Rider became an instant cult classic, selling over 100,000 copies. Brilliantly conceived and written at a break-neck pace, it is a loving, imaginative, and, above all, passionate tribute to the art of bicycle road racing.
Not a dry history of the sport, The Rider is beloved as a bicycle odyssey, a literary masterpiece that describes in painstaking detail one 150-kilometer race in a mere 150 pages. The Rider is the ultimate book for bike lovers as well as the arm-chair sports enthusiast.
Product Details
Editorial Reviews
From The New Yorker
At the start of this chronicle of a single bike race, the author glances up from his gear to assess the crowd of spectators. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me." In immediate, living prose, Krabbé, a novelist as well as a cyclist, takes us with him, inch by inch, as he rides the hundred-and-thirty-seven-kilometre Tour de Mont Aigoual, a course through the mountains that is better known as one of the cruellest stages of the Tour de France. He imagines an official collecting his clothes "after I've died in the race" recalls a champion cyclist who suffocated to death while climbing one particularly nasty hill; and insists that "being a good loser is a despicable evasion." Along the way, he lays bare the athlete's peculiar mixture of arrogance and terror, viciousness and camaraderie, and the result is one of the more convincing love stories of recent memory.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Review
'On the one hand it is a literary masterpiece that will still be read a hundred years from now; on the other, it is the best book on sports in the Dutch language' Leeuwarder Courant 'Whenever I hit rock bottom I always think of those immortal words from The Rider by Tim Krabbe - Battoowoo Creakcreak - and everything seems just fine again' Maarten Ducroit, racing cyclist 'Classic account of the fictional Tour de Mont Aigoual. Like all the best sports writing, The Rider manages to convey the excitement, determination and skill of the competitors even to readers who have little or no knowledge of the sport. Above all, he evokes the heightened focus of the cyclists, for whom nothing seems real apart from the race' London Review of Books
Review
"The Rider a beautiful brute, as hard and fast as a thin wheel in a concrete road."—The Observer (UK)
"Its 148 pages will flash by in a blur of reckless, high-speed pleasure."—The Independent (UK)
"The Rider is a great read—a great ride. Krabbé's half-day race, delivered kilometer by kilometer onto the page, shows the sport for what it is: painful, exhilarating, tactical, relational, fast, slow, dangerous, consuming, prone to mechanical failure, heroic, futile. The race—and the book about the race—becomes a raining and cold history of the rider's life. But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn't racing. Life is the metaphor for the race."—Donald Antrim
Customer Reviews
Read "The Rider"
If you love cycling you will enjoy "The Rider" very much.This gritty realistic story of a one day stage race made me feel a part of the peloton.Cycling is a demanding and dangerous sport.When I daydreamed of becoming a professional cyclist this book reminded me of why that probably wasn't a good idea.
Only 3 stars, and I'm being polite !
I had high hopes for this book, and truly felt it deserved only 2 stars. However, since there are not many cycling "novels" on the market, I felt compelled to issue a 3 star rating.
Just like the perennial movie that wins "Picture of the Year", and you shake your head and ask, "WHY"...this is no different. Granted, the author does offer the reader an occasional, brilliant passage or two that perhaps only a seasoned cyclist can directly relate to, but those are much too few and far between.
What's between is a mix of strange writing dialogue that...quite often... not only doesn't make sense, but he tends to bounces back in time to previous stories, and it gave (this) reader a bit of difficulty in not only following the intended story at hand, but staying focused enough to finish the book.
Rather disappointed.
Fantastic novella
A highly enjoyable book that really gets to the heart of bike racing - the sacrifice, the pain, the frustration. Well-written and intriguing, and short enough to be a nice fast read.
The only problem is that Krabbe goes off the rails every now and then; the lack of focus in a book this short is baffling.
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