THE CURSE OF A MISSED OPPORTUNITY- LAFON, SPORT, AND COMMUNISM
‘Nous sommes les oiseaux de la tempete qui s’ annonce’, by Lola Lafon, was not available on the shelves of the Mediatheque (currently reduced to the Dennis Saurat room alone, because of the difficulties always involved in renovating a building). But I was able to seize, in my less than dexterous hands, a book of hers from three years later (2014)- ‘La petite communiste qui ne souriait jamais’- another long title! This second book perhaps qualifies as an oddity. It is, as it were, posing as journalism- with Lola Lafon (apparently) being the reporter who pursues her subject, the part- elusive, part- insouciant, Nadia Comaneci.
One problem is the faking of this newshound premise, for the book is a fiction where Lola Lafon may never actually have met, phoned or interviewed Nadia. The conversations between the two are invented. What we have from Lafon is an essentially dull, ‘hack’ narrative, in which, on the whole, the poetry of gymnastics is never properly detailed and celebrated. Nor is there any intelligent analysis of why communism, despite all its (alleged?) idealism, failed. Lafon should be trying to use Nadia to explain the ultimate frailty of communism, but perhaps she lacks the apparatus of subtlety to show with enough incision the contrast between the nimbleness of the teenage gymnast and the clunking ineptitude of the communist state.
What Lafon lingers on in the book is the contrast between the young and the older Nadia. Young Nadia ‘appears an angel’. The older Nadia is a refugee on the run from a collapsing Rumania, is a dodgy female engaged in an adulterous relationship, is a fundamentally lonely individual eating too much in American diners, ‘drunk, fat and alone’.
Nadia becomes, then, a fallen angel. The fact that she could not stay lithe and fourteen forever may have been regrettable, but it was inevitable, so that Lafon’s emphasis on it is, in the end, banal rather than affecting.
The back of the book, with a variety of volume titles and source references, indicates one of Lafon’s problems- an overreliance on research. She has researched rather than engaged with Nadia personally; the foreword states the narrator has never actually met or talked with Nadia; the piece is a ‘dreamed fiction’- a novel masquerading as journalism. Perhaps this eventually impersonal approach contributes to the feeling of artifice, even pointlessness, about the piece.
On the other hand, Lafon has a Romanian background, thanking her parents at the book’s end for bringing her up in the country.
So Lafon has ambivalence towards Romania and communism, as a person with roots in both the West and the East. The book is reminiscent of ‘Liminov’ by Carrere, both novels being written in the form of journalism, and both concerning an ultimately elusive central character with a conflicted attitude towards the state and the ideology of the state. Comaneci may have been less the idiosyncratic rebel than Liminov, but he had a lot less fame than her.
Lafon is somewhat too wistful in looking back to Montreal and 1976; it is not just gymnastics’ poetry that we could be said to need in spades (and, the odd paragraph excepted, that is not provided) but the grim nitty gritty of the relationship between communism and sport. Lafon has a degree of ambivalence, but never to the extent required. She recognizes, but not enough, that the West too has had corruption and regimentation in sport. If Bela, Comaneci’s trainer, was a tyrant, albeit a seemingly benevolent one, then Western sport has its monsters and manipulators too, and drug cheats are ubiquitous in sport, West and East, North and South. To make communism the sole source of propaganda in sport would be simplistic.
Lafon had, I would say, a large seam to explore here. Think of Riefenstahl’s film celebrating the Nazi Lie in the Berlin Olympics! Lafon could have compared Montreal to Berlin, could have revealed the sham under the so- called Olympic ideal, could have indicated how the celebration of youth is in essence dangerous, but she alas contents herself with tame history and journalism, on an anemic scale; her style attempts to be breathless and immediate, but ends up as disappointing. There is not enough daring, not enough poetry- yet the story of Nadia cries out for poetry. And there is Nadia’s compliance, then flight from, communism, the grey communism, like a strangling of the heart, of police spies and an infirm but ruthless dictator, as aged as he is dangerous.
So this book is journalism without actually being journalism. One gathers that the interviews with Nadia are fabricated. We have a sense of fakery at the core of this book, then. As we have said, Lafon had a childhood in Rumania. Perhaps she romanticizes Nadia to excess, then debunks Nadia to excess, because of the author’s own identity crisis. Lafon feels kinship with Rumania, and tries to show an understanding of communism. Is Lafon herself wrenched between East and West? She does not criticize enough the role of the West in sport or the Cold War. The cynicism of the despotic coach, Bela, in switching from East to West, is not sufficiently emphasized, I feel. Drugs, politics- these curses apply in sport in the West as much as in the East.
The Reading Group took place in the Mediatheque, rather than the Salons- in the Dennis Saurat room, in fact- because of the renovations, which include the Salons. The usual moderator, M. Glynn, was not present, but the Reading Group soldiered on, under Frederic Jagu.
‘Nous sommes les oiseaux de la tempete qui s’annonce’ was discussed, in terms of its references to mental illness, rape, political dictatorship, and Romania. Is it comparable to ‘Baise- Moi’ by Virginie Despentes? Frederic Jagu commented, I believe, that he had known a friend of Lafon; Lafon had been tortured by a catastrophic relationship with a man, and this may have become a cause, an engine, for writing.
There was possibly during the debate a sense of discontent with ‘Nous sommes les oiseaux de la tempete qui s’annonce’; but it did spark off an apparently passionate discussion on feminism, for example, the movement on the streets of Paris known as ‘La Nuit Debout’.
As for ‘La Petite Communiste qui ne souriait jamais’ (to repeat, Lafon has a not altogether impressive penchant for long book titles!), I concluded that the book was a missed opportunity to dive deep into how sport- seeming so clean- cut, patriotic, indeed (with gymnastics particularly) physically poetic- can suffer from political contamination, in West or East. The chapters are short, the ideas verge on the half- baked, and we are left with the sensation we have been given only one quarter of a meal instead of the full three courses. That Lafon dwells so much on the pathos of a former child star turning into an unsure, nervous adult is merely to highlight a commonplace.
The Reading Group ended, the last of the season, with the hopefully lazy Summer holidays in front of us. I remember 1976, watching Nadia on the TV, the juddering thrill of observing across the Cathode tube a vastly difficult somersault. I dragged my arthritic body down the steps leading away from the Mediatheque, and hobbled, with my habitual lack of grace, towards the bustle, rather frightening for an old man such as me, of South Kensington Underground station.
ZEKRIA IBRAHIMI (AGED 57)