One of TikTok’s newer trends is the virtual book club. A 30-second video, a minute at most, a quick review of a book and then the comments, where ideas are exchanged and challenges are set between those trying to be the first to finish it. Sometimes, though, a recommendation can shift a country’s book market. That is what happened in Brazil, where Gustavo Scarpa, the Atlético Mineiro midfielder, picked up a book, talked about it on social media and, within days, the book had set a new sales record. Scarpa posted a video on YouTube about The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Lev Tolstoy’s enduring masterpiece. The video was viewed more than 699,000 times, while a clip posted on Instagram reached more than a million people, and in September The Death of Ivan Ilyich became the best-selling book on Amazon Brazil. After Scarpa’s video, Google searches for the book rose by more than 70 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier, and by as much as 300 per cent compared with the previous month.
“At first I didn’t believe it,” Scarpa told Folha de S.Paulo, surprised by the scale of it himself. The Brazilian midfielder has been talking about books on social media since 2019, when he was still at Palmeiras. At first, he did it with short clips, almost flashes: a sentence, a word, a quick rating. In recent months, though, he has changed his approach. He has started recording longer videos, going into greater depth about the books and talking about what he actually found in them. “Before, I would summarise the summary, sometimes just a word or a sentence. Now I analyse what I actually understand. The videos are longer, and people liked the idea,” he explained.
The result was almost paradoxical: a professional footballer had brought a classic of Russian literature back into the conversation, well beyond the world of football. In Belo Horizonte, Carolina Marques, 22, an Atlético Mineiro supporter, created “Galeitura”, a reading group born from Scarpa’s recommendations. The WhatsApp group had 300 members on its first day, while its social media account passed 50,000 followers. The idea is to read and discuss the twelve chapters of The Death of Ivan Ilyich over three weeks. Some of Scarpa’s team-mates have started bringing their own books to physiotherapy sessions.
Scarpa, in short, has managed to make one of his own habits contagious, almost fashionable. His passion for reading is hardly a recent discovery. In 2021, when he already had a sizeable following on social media, Scarpa began rating and reviewing the great classics in a distinctly informal tone. Today, though, the Atlético Mineiro player seems to have taken more seriously the role that comes with that audience. Not only that of a footballer, but also that of a public figure whose recommendations can influence what his followers choose to read. That is why, when he decides what to publish, Scarpa prefers not to construct a persona or follow whatever might work best. “I understood a long time ago the responsibility I have. I try to share the things I like.”
Even his list of upcoming reads says something about the way he approaches literature. There are other classics, naturally: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat and Other Stories, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. But alongside the great names of European literature there are also lighter, contemporary books, including books by Freida McFadden. For Scarpa, after all, the point is not to build a canon or convince everyone to read the same books, but to make them want to open one. “I wanted people to give the books I post a chance, or at least, if not those, any other books, because it’s a beautiful habit.” This time, though, that simple habit produced a surprising effect. A footballer talked about Tolstoy, thousands of people listened, and a book written in the nineteenth century returned to the top of the charts.