Accomplished tennis player, talented actor and writer James Hyndman signs his third book this year, False Rebounds, in which he combines his passion for this sport and that of the right word. This real pleasure of reading navigates between humor and more serious passages, like the ups and downs in human relationships. It is punctuated with anecdotes and confessions. The short stories are interspersed with notes on the highlights of tennis history.
James Hyndman, a pen writer who is both very fair and very elegant, stylish, will delight tennis fans with this new book. Even those who are less familiar with this sport will find it interesting.
In an interview, James Hyndman explains that his books always have a mosaic effect and he confirms his passion for tennis.
“I’ve been playing all my life. I come from a family for whom tennis was a religion. I competed. I still play. It has been a great passion of my life and it still is.
This book was born from the chronicles he has published since 2015 in the magazine Tennis Mag.
“I am a fan of what is called sports literature, which is a genre that does not exist in Quebec, but is extremely lively and present in France. There are a lot of renowned writers – Goncourt prize winners, Renaudot prize winners – who have written about sport. These are literary writings that talk about sport, life around sport. It is a great tradition and all kinds of literary prizes are awarded in France for so-called sports literature books. Me, it’s a genre that has always fascinated me.
When he started writing his columns for the magazine, he immediately thought of writing them based on a book.
“I started to project myself into the future, I imagined chapters, subjects. I would put that in my little box and once in a while I would lay an article for the magazine and once in a while I would lay a chapter that I kept for the book. It is […] half and half of the articles which were published in the magazine Tennis Mag which were reworked, and chapters which were specifically written for the book.
He wanted to write a book like we haven’t often seen, which deals with both tennis news and his personal history around tennis, and how tennis is, in his opinion, a way to learn to live.
Microfiction
He also inserted what he calls microfictions in this work, which allow him to drift around tennis and have fun.
“There are dialogues and the final chapter is a kind of invented dream that allows me to insert all kinds of elements from the previous chapters, like motifs that come back in the dream.”
He had fun.
“There is the chapter of a man who lives in the imaginary village of Sainte-Pauline-des-Battures, who makes a very Quebec speech, very from our region, from Bas-Saint-Laurent, because he won a local tournament.
He finds that his work is hybrid.
“I wanted to be very surprising for the reader, so that it could interest people who know tennis as much as people who don’t know anything about tennis.”
There is always a great humanity and deep reflections in the texts of James Hyndman.
“The goal is to be as authentic as possible: how do I look at sport, tennis, sports practice?”
“Of great champions, I like flaws and weaknesses perhaps even more than feats of arms. Nadal who stumbles and struggles as best he can with hitherto unknown drops in confidence, that brings him closer to me. Serena collapsing at the dawn of a historic victory at hand is heartbreaking of course, but in a world where the demands of perfection and performance triumph, being reminded that victory eludes even the most great – that the size of the stakes sometimes paralyzes them, too – reconciles us with our own fallibilities.”
– James Hyndman, False Rebounds, XYZ Publishing
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