If we should remember that two memorable moments of the Olympic Games of the twentieth century, this would be the incredible performance of Jesse Owens in Berlin in 1936, defying the black athlete racial theories of Hitler, and the perfection of the angel Nadia Comaneci Montreal in 1976, a global strike lightning and an explosion which even affected the non-programmed computers to display a 10 out of 10. Two sporting achievements but two political symbols, too, against Nazism on the one hand, during the Cold War, on the other hand. That we know more or less the route of Nadia, the little Communist who never smiled is a "novel" exciting. Because it tells the story of a magnesium and magnetic icon, which is pressed to denigrate quickly because he had mounted too high, too fast, too strong. Because Lola Lafon describes the scenes: the iron discipline, they imagined, the burning ambition of a mentor, we knew it, the hunger that gnawed continually stomachs, it is sensed. And this fascination of the West to this cold and expressionless doll, kid Carpathian irradiate the world came time for a summer. By imagining an imaginary dialogue with Nadia that would correct his own text, Lola Lafon destroys itself all the shots or at least qualify the: capitalism vs. communism, girls vs. women, dominance vs. slavery. The small Communist who never smiled goes beyond biography, creeps into the intricacies of the show Sport and eroticism of bodies, in the antechamber of Ceausescu (we forgot he was once a sort of enlightened despot railing against the "big brother" Soviet). The Harder They Fall, and the book is so cruel. Nadia gaining weight, Nadia flirts with power, Nadia is not what capricant cute squirrel, Nadia fled the regime that made queen. In a style that leaps over the parallel bars, the novelist weaves a journey that is as much legend than truth. Today, Comaneci is happy in the United States, there is nothing more to say to her. What she was, how she lived this priesthood and sacrifices, blood, sweat and sawdust before the glory and triumph ultimately remains a mystery. It belongs to him forever.
