This may be the only day when I can’t post this book review (below) without a ‘shell’. I’m curious if my ‘parasocial bubble’ will light up about this anniversary — Romania has been all over ‘fifty years since Nadia’s Perfect 10’ for months. Nadia Comăneci herself must have talked about that day thousands of times by now, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from her own book, ‘Letters to a Young Gymnast’, it’s that she perseveres in everything, including grace.

That Perfect 10 awarded to Nadia in 1976 was the first Olympic one in the women’s competition and indisputably the most celebrated since. I don’t need to check that it’s Nadia on the book’s cover, but I still do: white leotard, red-yellow-blue stripes on the sides, number 73. At the time, that’s a fourteen-year-old who had once fallen off the balance beam three times in a single routine, during her first Nationals. (The first book about her, the one by Ioan Chirila, opens with that scene, if my recollection holds.)

I wasn’t around yet to watch that famous 1976 routine live. But I did cheer for the last Olympic 10 — Lavinia Miloșovici’s in 1992 — as it happened.

Oh, 1992. Right after the implosion of the Soviet Union, after the Albertville Winter Olympics, after Romania’s men’s soccer team (which included Gheorghe Hagi in his prime) defeated Wales 5-1. That was the first time I saw the canary-yellow of their jerseys, because the new TV we’d just bought in Bucharest was a colour one. 1992: Montserrat Caballé and Freddie Mercury (gone the year before) singing ‘Barcelona’, the anthem of those Olympics, in a video recorded before the end of the Cold War, in a different world.

Many of my memories of Olympic (and soccer championship) summers have some kind of aliveness, whether they’re bright or not. 1994, Pasadena, Stanford: soccer World Cup. The yellow-clad team captained by Hagi defeats greats of the sport, tournament-favourites Colombia and Argentina, the latter in a match sometimes called ‘the best ever’ in World Cup history; dreams of the semifinals but, wearing their red reserve kit, narrowly loses to Sweden. At home, when the team wins, we fill the late-night streets in celebration, and when they lose so bitterly we weep with them. 1996, Atlanta: all three Romanian gymnasts in women’s all-around make the podium; I’m preparing for two trips to the original Olympic city, Athens, but I can’t miss going out to get the sports-newspaper. 2000, Brussels: Hagi plays his last Euro match, a loss to Italy. Sydney: in my friend’s Georgiana’s living-room, we cheer for an (initially) all-Romanian gymnastics all-around podium. 2004, Athens (finally): on a university campus patio with a projector, we cheer for the gymnastics teams gold and bronze, more individual gold; we watch a men’s floor-final tie-break for the Olympic champion title that the Romanian loses to a Canadian. 2008, Beijing: the same athlete misses a gold again, in an event where he had innovated (‘the Drăgulescu vault’ is still one of the most complex in the sport and well rewarded by every incarnation of the Code of Points). This is the first of these summers that I’m not there, in the country whose eyes are watching these athletes; in the morning, I try to explain the heartbreak to my friends here in Canada, but there’s too much context that I can’t convey.

I’m also thinking this is my generation, signing out. I’m starting to sense time.

The men’s soccer team hasn’t qualified for a continental or world tournament since 2008. Romanian gymnastics has seen, as this book aptly describes, a rapid decline. But Nadia and Hagi remain high-recognition names associated with the country — and with a way of experiencing joy or defeat together for us, those who happened to be their active-career contemporaries. The composition of the ‘we’ I’ve been using is fluid, but accretes into an identifiable, identity-shaping collective whole through that kind of experience.

Dracula is a slightly different story — I don’t think we really ‘embraced the brand’ as perceived outside Romania until relatively recently. The ‘Well, actually…’ reflex persisted for years before we started selling fridge magnets with Vlad the Impaler/Dracula’s portrait against a tricolour backdrop.

And this is why I’ll wear my yellow Romania jersey in the 1994-Pasadena-summer heat today.

‘The End of the Perfect 10: The Making and Breaking of Gymnastics’ Top Score—from Nadia to Now’

Author: Dvora Meyers

★★★

I've been following gymnastics since the Perfect 10's days of glory in the late '80s, so while I thought this was an excellent book, I am not sure how compelling it may be for readers who may not follow the sport. Also, I'm from one of the early "Big 4" countries — specifically the one that supplied perhaps the most dramatic "why did they fall from grace?" case study in the book, Romania — so this, at times, was an emotional read for me. The research and knowledge that went into writing this book is phenomenal, and the level of detail about the last decades of American gymnastics in particular, from grassroots to elite to NCAA, is incredible.

My source: local public library.
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/125105/9781501101595

This is one of those books I borrow, read the first chapter or so, then I let the loan lapse and need to procure again. (There may be years between these events, and I may have nothing other than a sense of familiarity with the first part that I end up re-reading.) This time, which was a couple of weeks ago, I managed to finish it.

It was the 2012 version, with at least the afterword being new compared to the 1989 edition. I’m mentioning this because remembering that the book was written before the late ‘80s helped me file certain things under “very dated, possibly generationally conditioned”.

(As a disclaimer of sorts, I’ve been nominally interested in existential psychotherapy for a while. I think this was a very reasonable entry point, but I still feel that I need to fill gaps in my knowledge pertaining to its philosophical roots.)

There are ten “tales” here, and Yalom states upfront that he changed a lot of specific details so that the patients could not be identified. This does something interesting with suspension of disbelief, and I agree that “tale” is the best descriptor. The available spectrum definitely contains “case study” and “parable”… Given his excellent storytelling talent, including the way he combines honesty and misdirection, as well as the structural differences between pieces, I’m certain there was an intention behind each piece and the whole, and that every word in this book was painstakingly scrutinized at the time of writing.

The most present in that overall intention is how we handle mortality. But Yalom even states that at the beginning. What intrigued me was that there were long stretches when I didn’t think about it. I believe that Yalom himself sets it aside at times—some of those times more deliberately and actively. (Also probably part of the misdirection.)

On the authorial (and authority’s) honesty: he shares his erring, worrying, liking his patients too much or not enough. The distance (by which I mean the extent to which he’s willing to divulge it) shifts from one tale to the next, and he’ll admit he disliked a patient, or conflated another with his mother, or could never quite catch up with yet another’s “real” self.

I do think that there’s some unevenness in the catching of the blindspots, but it’s funny how trust works. This is written inside subjectivity, acknowledged as such repeatedly, and yet here I was expecting, on some level, perfection.

“A third barrier to the full knowing of another lies not in the one who shares but in the other, the knower, who must reverse the sharer’s sequence and translate language back into image—the script the mind can read. It is wildly improbable that the receiver’s image will match the sender’s original mental image.”

I recognized (as in: related to) elements in most tales. Some of my reading notes, as recorded, sans patients’ names as to de-identify individual tales :) :

• Maybe fewer things and behaviours are beyond redemption than I thought. This does erode some of my absolutism in ways that are both comforting and not.

• Hm, counter-dependency and shame and jolliness, plus something-to-prove. The language does irk me.

• Wow, a failure! I think it mirrors his own internal failure but...perhaps he expects the reader to make that parallel, and doesn’t contradict it. (“Maybe I’ll work on it someday.” — and I for one wonder if it doesn’t get harder with age to do that.)

• Exceptional story on the unknowability of the other. Yalom articulates (in part because he has the courage to say it, but he’s also way more proficient with words) what I try to say in my Gloria Trillo essay.

• Ugh, male potency as the crux, both partner and therapist more inside the frame than outside it, but this is also a pattern I recognize and can’t reject on plausibility considerations.

Overall, worth reading.

My source: local public library.
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/125105/9780465031603

(Notes:
1. For spoilers, select the spoiler text to reveal it.
2. The highlighted text is also posted on Goodreads, but, in true alexithymic fashion, I didn’t realize I had a built-in cultural lens for a read in a somewhat different tone that I think is at least as accurate. That read is at the end, without highlight.)

Great premise, well materialized. There are pages and paragraphs that can be philosophical springboards, as well as somewhat dragging portions that I tend to find jarring — possibly because the medium is not the ideal one for rendering lively small-talk, even if the content of the exchange does further the action.

LE: This was a verbose way of saying that about halfway through, I was getting bored. [SPOILER: The MC was inevitably becoming wiser, comprehension was erasing depression (or rather smudging it much like a pencil eraser would smudge ink on paper), the structural bones of the book were growing conspicuous...and this reader was beginning to wonder if this is more an intellectual exercise pushed a little too far via plot construction than it is anything else.]

My source: local public library.
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/125105/9781632869968
Bonus: expanded understanding of what sells.

(Notes:
1. For spoilers, select the spoiler text to reveal it.
2. The highlighted text is also posted on Goodreads, but, in true alexithymic fashion, I didn’t realize I had a built-in cultural lens for a read in a somewhat different tone that I think is at least as accurate. That read is at the end, without highlight.)

This is what a life unlived inside dualities can feel like - unlived. I’ve just finished it and my overall impression was that numerous large stories are packed inside a plot carried by essentially unintriguing people.

The complexity is daunting, yet the book’s flow brought to mind water flowing through the Bosphorus. I was charmed throughout, albeit a little annoyed here and there when the literary veil became thin enough to make me wonder if the story earns its entire length. In these places, what otherwise appears close to a pointillist work, built from detail, gets lines, too. [SPOILER: Azur's seminars tend to read this way - these lines are drawn as parallels at first, then made to intersect rhetorically, almost akin to a performance. The fabricated environment lands on the reader before it does on Peri.]

The length is earned, I think, but this book is not to be approached expecting a page-turner. Its beauty is the journey, the background; its core, I believe, is that sense of unlivedness by avoiding the clarity and comfort that can appear to be offered by a “side”.
(There may be a quote or two that illustrate this, but I’ll have to revisit my highlights to retrieve them.)

[SPOILER: Peri is a functionally neutral device for the socio-cultural mosaic that formed and continues to form her, a placeholder for the paralysis that can result from thoughtfulness, for the bystander-as-coward who, afraid to face the depth of experience and the risk of erring, still errs. On the other hand, Azur forces depths upon others, calls for shattering the self without offering anything but doubt in return, is unapologetic-by-trauma and surrogate-seeking. They (especially Peri, of course) are near-blank canvases, vehicles stuck on conflict highways: East vs. West, faith vs. doubt, immigrant identity.]

My source: our local public library.
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/125105/9781632869968
Bonus: Without a doubt, finally discovering Elif Shafak’s fiction; I had been meaning to for a long time.

Added June 29: There are a few Romanian sayings that we use to describe a certain sort of ambivalence. I’m sure other cultures/languages have equivalents; English has “playing for both teams” that carries mostly the opportunistic nuance. Our sayings tend to be a bit more graphic. “Having one’s behind in two boats” (“a avea fundu-n două luntri”) is close to the Spanish “nadar entre dos aguas”. Both idioms may indicate an opportunist, yes, or someone who’s truly undecided. However, I only have the confidence to speak about the implied risk in Romanian: one might will fall in the water.

Now, the one that fits Peri pretty much to the T in “literally” is (and I’ll try to smooth away some crudeness — we’re good at that too): “they want both their reproductive parts ‘busy’ and their soul in heaven” (“și cu … și cu sufletu-n rai”) — someone who reaches for an impossible compromise that in fact denies them both worldly freedom and nextworldly absolution.

I read most of this book (original version in Romanian) on a long bus tour through western Canada. Some days, we were on the road for 10-11 hours. I am mentioning this because I cannot fathom other circumstances where I could absorb long stretches of this book at a time. Even so, there were moments when I had to stop—the methodical unravelling of the tragedies sewn so deeply into the fabric of the twentieth century is bound to not leave much room for breathing. The book is built on exquisite research and understanding of history and it will likely be a “heavy” read from both an intellectual and emotional standpoint. I would not hesitate to recommend this book as an essential read to anyone looking to learn about how the recent past molded the present, not only in Europe but globally.

My source: gift from a friend who still cares enough to have gone to a protest today in Romania.
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/125105/9780520239722
Bonus: I’m not sure if there’s much of a bonus in potentially seeing more of these mechanics that play out in real-time around us.

An exceptional collection of essays that articulates, in exquisitely researched words, many ways in which Star Trek reflected and shaped the last sixty years. No Trek is looked over, and representation, one of the major points for which Star Trek has always been praised, is fully contextualized. I enjoyed both detailed analyses covering more focused time-frames and pieces following longer threads that passed through multiple incarnations of Trek. (Majel Barrett and her characters, especially Lwaxana Troi, have a profoundly resonating place in my heart.) As far as my early, foundational Trek-cultural pillars go, I belong to the generation of The Next Generation through and through, with a lot of love for Deep Space Nine and Enterprise (in the sense that I often end up re-watching episodes and could probably recite a few of them), but I enjoy all Trek and the new (to me) perspectives on its cultural impact that this book brought are, to put it quite simply, invaluable.

My source: the local library, via placing a request online. (Thank you!)
Bookshop.org: link
Bonus: finding the Star Trek Book Club while looking for a good image of the cover.