The Tournament (Clarke novel)
The Tournament, a 2002 novel in the form of sports-reportage written by New Zealand-born Australian satirist John Clarke, depicts a fictional international tennis tournament held in Paris and featuring a variety of notable twentieth-century literary, cultural and scientific figures as competitors.
Several other identities appear: Charles Darwin as the tournament referee, for example, and Friedrich Nietzsche as the "president and CEO of Nike". Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler provide commentary. Roland Barthes, Emmeline Pankhurst, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer and many others appear as sports reporters covering the match. A demonstration doubles match features Henrik Ibsen and Claude Monet vs. Henry James and Mark Twain.
Coaches
- United States: Ernie Hemingway
Spectators
- Nelson Algren
Players in the tournament
Men
- Louis Armstrong
- Jean Arp
- Fred Astaire
- W. H. Auden
- Léon Bakst
- Béla Bartók
- Sam Beckett
- Bix Beiderbecke
- Walter Benjamin
- John Betjeman
- Ambrose Bierce
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Bertolt Brecht
- Bill Burroughs
- Karel Čapek
- Hoagy Carmichael
- Rudolf Carnap
- Ray Chandler
- Marc Chagall
- Charlie Chaplin
- Tony Chekhov
- Joseph Conrad
- Salvador Dalí
- Willem de Kooning
- Cecil B. DeMille
- Marcel Duchamp
- Albert Einstein
- SuperTom Eliot
- Duke Ellington
- Maurits Escher
- William Faulkner
- Enrico Fermi
- Bill Fields
- Ford Maddox Ford
- Sigmund "The Doc" Freud
- John Galsworthy
- Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
- George Gershwin
- Ira Gershwin
- Thomas Hardy
- Lafcadio Hearn
- Martin Heidegger
- Hermann Hesse
- Fred Hitchcock
- Aldous Huxley
- Christopher Isherwood
- Scott Joplin
- James Joyce
- Attila József
- Carl Jung
- Franz Kafka
- Nikos Kazantzakis
- Buster Keaton
- John Maynard Keynes
- Paul Klee
- Gustav Klimt
- Arthur Koestler
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
- Jacques Lacan
- Ring Lardner
- D. H. Lawrence
- David Low
- Ernst Lubitsch
- Louis MacNeice
- René Magritte
- Gustav Mahler
- André Malraux
- Osip Mandelstam
- Thomas Mann
- Groucho Marx
- Henri Matisse
- Willie Maugham
- Vladimir Mayakovski
- Alan Milne
- Edwin Muir
- Edvard "Eddie" Munch
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Pablo Neruda
- Vaslav Nijinsky
- Seán O'Casey
- George Orwell
- Ignacy Jan Paderewski
- Boris Pasternak
- Pablo Picasso
- Luigi Pirandello
- Cole Porter
- Ezra Pound
- Sergei Prokofiev
- Marcel Proust
- Giacomo Puccini
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Paul Robeson
- Henri Rousseau
- Damon Runyon
- Salman Rushdie
- Little Bertie Russell
- Ernest Rutherford
- Jean-Paul "JPS" Sartre
- Jerry Salinger
- Albert Schweitzer
- Alexander Scriabin
- Georges Seurat
- Dmitri Shostakovich
- Jean Sibelius
- Benjamin "The Spockster" Spock
- Lytton Strachey
- Igor Stravinsky
- Leo "The Count" Tolstoy
- Arturo Toscanini
- Henri Toulouse-Lautrec
- Vincent van Gogh
- Evelyn Waugh
- Fats Waller
- Herbie Wells
- Butch Whitman
- William Carlos Williams
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Plum Wodehouse
- Frank Lloyd Wright
- Big Bill Yeats
Women
- Anna Akhmatova
- Hannah Arendt
- Nancy Astor
- Josephine Baker
- Tallulah Bankhead
- Sylvia Beach
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Sylvia Beach
- Sarah Bernhardt
- Annie Besant
- Enid Blyton
- Willa Cather
- Coco Chanel
- Isadora Duncan
- Amelia Earhart
- Greta Garbo
- Mary Garden
- Mata Hari
- Lillian Hellman
- Frances Hodgkins
- Frida Kahlo
- Melanie Klein
- Rosa Luxemburg
- Mary McCarthy
- Nadezhda Mandelstam
- Katherine Mansfield
- Nellie Melba
- Margaret Mitchell
- Maria Montessori
- Georgia O'Keeffe
- Dorothy Parker
- Anna Pavlova
- Mary Pickford
- Ayn Rand
- Leni Riefenstahl
- Eleanor Roosevelt
- Vita Sackville-West
- Christina Stead
- Gertrude Stein
- Marie Stopes
- Edna St Vincent Millay
- Gloria Swanson
- Mae West
- Virginia Stephen-Woolf
- Sybil Thorndike
- Marguerite Yourcenar