The Rider
By: Tim Krabbé / Narrated By: Mark Meadows
Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
Great writing, wonderful experience!
Apparently I’m not the audience for this book, The Rider. It’s s’posed to be for cycling fans and armchair enthusiasts; and while the armchair does indeed sound appealing? Well, I’ve gotta admit that I only started watching cycling (Kinda sorta peripherally) whenst m’ husband was glued to the TV watching, yup, the Tour de France. I can’t remember what year it was, but Lance Armstrong, before he was THE Lance Armstrong, and certainly before he was THE DISGRACED Lance Armstrong, was yipping about how he couldn’t get a break going, no cooperation, yip yip doing it all by his poor li’l lonesome self yip.
CERtainly NOT a very good first impression of cycling. So why, you ask, would I even choooose a danged book on cycling?
Dude! it’s an audiobook!
Our story, this incredibly fun odyssey, opens in 1977 where Krabbé put himself in the piece as the kinda sorta EveryMan of Cycling on the grueling Tour de Mont Aigoual. It’s truly well-crafted, and it sorta reminds me of Stephen King’s The Long Walk in that Krabbé starts all jauntily enough, prepping himself for the race with peeled oranges and then dashing back for figs, dithering about just how many to take with him on the race, and then? Oh good golly gosh: It zooooms off from there, as he pedals, contemplates, then completely STOPS contemplating cuz jeez he’s just pumping every single muscle of his body to climb climb climb, then p’raps his body is shrieking cuz there ain’t no downslope in which to catch his breath but is instead an extended freakin’ plateau where he has to pump pump pump just to keep going on even terrain.
MARvelous!
As a person who lives in m’ head and journeys from a horizontal position to a vertical one only to feed the cats? AWESOME journey! Interspersed throughout are snippets here and there as they fly through his brain, as he muses about the lives, the oh such empty lives of people who do NOT cycle, who do NOT wring every single drop of physical energy from their bodies. Oh how pathetic they are, and he pities them in well-written lines of wry and sometimes scaaaathing humor.
And oh how he judges the others he rides with (HiLARious!), even as he portrays a sense of joyous camaraderie, even as he explains the Herd Mentality of that peculiar group, The Peloton, as they travel in packs, or make breaks, or p’raps of ill-advised headlong dashes, or as they ride the wind behind each other, as they jeer each other, and maybe even as they encourage each other. Then too, throughout are instances of Krabbé’s formative years, cycling cycling cycling, beating his personal bests, monitoring progress and self-worth by the clock he sees within his childhood home, that clock on the shelf that’ll tell him if he’s shaved any time off, that unbearable sense of loss when the clock is removed. How on EARTH will he assess himself now, he wails?!
Need I say that Mark Meadows turns in a grand performance? Well, here in The Rider he’s absolutely stunning. Only he could make each grueling kilometer, each bit o’ stream o’ conscious thought, riveting and worth the close-listen. And accents? Jiminy H. Cricket, I have to admit that m’ French is limited (Like, seVEREly), and m’ Dutch? Non-existent. -BUT- if the eeeeease of the pronunciations is anything to go by? Meadows would appear to be a Master Narrator!
Man, only 4 1/2 hours, but you’ll feel like you’re there, whipping through the wind, sweating your brains out, and you’ll feel the sense that you’re at Death’s Very Door but Loving Every Minute Of It.
And?
Aaaaaaallll without having to get outta bed! The cats can feed themselves…!
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