An outstanding literary novel about a Tour de France rider | Richard Williams | Sport | The Guardian

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Ventoux, by Bert Wagendorp, is the story of six people – five men and one woman – who form a friendship during their schooldays in a small town outside Amsterdam in the early 1980s and in whose lives the Giant of Provence comes to play a significant role.

The title and the drawing of a racing bike on the cover persuaded me to pick it up from a bookshop table a couple of weeks ago. Flipping through its pages, I noticed some familiar cycling names – Simpson, Gerrie Knetemann, Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx – along with others from different areas of interest: Nick Drake, Charlie Parker, Roland Barthes, Petrarch, Frank Zappa. While wondering what a novelist might succeed in making from this combination, I was encouraged when I spotted a mention of Tim Krabbé’s The Rider, a novel beloved of many cycling enthusiasts. The narrator of Ventoux, a journalist named Bart Hoffman, remarks that it was through reading The Rider as a teenager that he was inspired to try to become a writer and this, 30 years later, is his effort. . . .

So Ventoux instantly joins my own extremely short list of outstanding literary novels in which sport plays a significant role

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An outstanding literary novel about a Tour de France rider | Richard Williams | Sport | The Guardian