The Rider

"This book was written in the late 1970s. Tim Krabbé is Dutch and the book wasn’t translated into English until the early 2000s. He’s an avid chess player , cyclist, polymath, just an all-around interesting person. He’s about to turn 80, and essentially what The Rider is is a direct—I daresay phenomenological—account of what it’s like to be in this bike race in the Netherlands. It’s absolutely fictionalized. This is not a particular race, not a particular rider, the names have been changed, although Krabbé himself appears as a competitor and we see the race from his perspective. Everything is very immediate, very visceral. It’s a description of, ‘this breakaway has gone up the road, the rain has started to pound and I can’t feel my fingertips on the brake levers.’ There’s a very cult-like immediacy to how he approaches the sport. The writing is phenomenal. What it reminds me of, more than anything else, is Albert Camus’ fiction. You think of the opening line of The Stranger , the very famous one, “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.” There’s a similar bit as soon as you get going in The Rider : “Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafés. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.” I read Camus before reading The Rider , but as soon as I read The Rider , I thought, ‘this is the cycling novel that Camus would have written.’ It’s an incredible piece of writing. I think that among most cycling aficionados, it’s ranked as the most literary and most highly regarded cycling novel—to the point where it has perhaps blotted out other interesting writing on the sport. Yes. Films and cycling in particular are a tricky business. There are so many that I’ve seen where the jerseys are wrong, or it doesn’t ring true. Everything rings true with The Rider and that’s what makes it such an interesting accomplishment. And it’s not just a matter of strict accuracy and verisimilitude, it also gets the psychology right. That line that I alluded to earlier, this feeling of exclusivity: this undertaking is difficult but elective, and everyone else seems like a civilian by contrast. Yes. It has got that novella immediacy to it. There’s not a lot of back story. There’s nothing bogging it down, trying to impress his reader or anything like that. This is direct, immediate experience of what it is to race a bicycle. I actually can’t recall. I think it was one of those books I came across because it was circulated amongst racers with literary proclivities. That, in and of itself, is a testament to its general authenticity."