So Many Olympic Exertions

by Anelise Chen

Blending elements of memoir and sports writing, Anelise Chen's debut novel is an experimental work that perhaps most resembles what the ancient Greeks called hyponemata, or -notes to the self, - in the form of observations, reminders and self-exhortations. Taken together, these notes constitute a personal handbook on -how to live---or perhaps more urgently -why to live, - a question the narrator, graduate student Athena Chen, desperately needs answering. When Chen hears news that her brilliant friend from college has committed suicide, she is thrown into a fugue of fear and doubt. Through anecdotes and close readings of moments in the sometimes harrowing world of sports, the novel questions the validity of our current narratives of success.Anelise Chen earned her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Gawker, NPR and elsewhere. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Sports, Contemporary, Literature, Asian American, Philosophy

200 pages, Paperback

First published August 22, 2017

About the author

Anelise Chen is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University, where she is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her first novel, So Many Olympic Exertions, was published by Kaya Press in 2017. It was a VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Finalist. She is currently working on a second book, Clam Down (One World), based on her brief stint as the Paris Review Daily's "mollusk correspondent." She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Awardee. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, The Believer, McSweeney's, BOMB, The New Republic, NPR, Village Voice, Conjunctions, and more.

Reviews

[Isabela.]

Tiene 227 páginas, aclarando.

Es un libro bastante autobiográfico, de ahí la falta de puntuación.

Hablando del libro, es bastante pesado. Sobre todo si no sabes absolutamente nada sobre deportes. O al menos lo fue para mí.
El que sea pesado no es algo malo, al contrario. Las pausas continuas te ayudan a digerir la situación un poco mejor, incluso puedes tomar distintas perspectivas a lo que se lee. La cosa es que me deprimió a ratos. Sobre todo cuando hablaba sobre accidentes o fracasos. No fue lo ideal para mí estado actual de ánimo y creo que eso se reflejó bastante en el tiempo que me tomó terminarlo.

Es una lectura bastante interesante aunque exasperante. Existen momentos donde todo se vuelve tan revuelto o difícil que simplemente tienes que dejarlo abajo para sentirte un poco mejor. Aunque también tiene sus momentos en los que es bastante relajado y puedes seguir adelante sin pensar mucho en lo que sucede.

Se siente como un e-mail excesivamente largo. Incluso me atrevería a decir que es una especie de diario, por la forma tan drástica en que se lanza de un tema al otro.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had some interesting reflections about academia, grief, and sports. While I found the prose intriguing and compelling, I felt that Anelise Chen didn’t really tie all these different threads together. There was some connection about struggling to get academic work done and the exhaustion experienced by pro athletes, though these could have been made more explicit. I also wanted more detail about a lot of the main character’s musings – why is academic work so hard for her? What are her feelings about her friend having died? Without these more concrete details it was difficult for me to get more emotionally invested in the narrative. An experimental novel that left me wanting more though may resonate with other readers who are drawn in by the subject matter.

[Brendan Monroe · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is the link between success and happiness? Can you have the latter without the former?

Is a person's own definition of success, like happiness, theirs alone? Or is there a roadmap that will help you get there?

This is a small book that attempts to answer big questions. It's yet another in that new genre of "auto fiction", which is to say a fictional book by an author who seems to be writing about his or her own life and the events in it. Except that the author's name is Anelise Chen, and the name of our protagonist is Athena Chen. (Athena ... get it? Because this book deals with those age old philosophical questions famously popularized by the Ancient Greeks.)

Athena is a PhD student who can't seem to make any progress on her dissertation and whose former lover has just committed suicide. This act causes her to look back over her life in an attempt to find meaning.

What do any of us actually have to live for? Is there a method to the madness, or is the madness all there is?

These are questions that have received new attention in the digital age. Millennials, of which I am a fellow hopeless member, feel to me to be the least "sure" generation in, well, a while, anyway. I'm not sure. Technology has just amplified the uncertainty, as we have more information at our fingertips than any generation that came before us and yet we find ourselves less certain than ever about who we are or what we want.

Chen zooms in on professional success as the answer, and examines the lives of athletes to give her insight into whether or not accomplished athletes are happier than the rest of us.

I'm not a sports fan, but looking at the lives of various athletes and the things that make them different from us is fascinating. Chen, a former competitive swimmer herself, also takes a look at what sports does to the rest of us.

Really, why do any of us give a damn about sports? What is it about watching our football team win the World Cup, or the Super Bowl — depending on what football means to you — that's so important to us? Why is it so important to us? This team, which we have nothing to do with really, wins a big game, and for some reason we care? For what reason? What role does that team’s success play in our own identity or how we feel about ourselves?

Chen cites some interesting data about how supporters of winning teams have higher testosterone levels than supporters of losing teams, leading to higher levels of confidence, but she doesn't touch on what I think the actual reason is, which is that we all want to be in a group or community of some kind, all want to feel a connection to others and have a label by which we can identify ourselves, more for ourselves than for others, I think.

There are some moments when I wish Chen would have gone further down a particular rabbit hole and many in which I wish she would have talked less about her own life and focused more on these issues. The two don't always seem to align.

There's a lot of information, really fascinating information, but the links between it all sometimes feels tenuous. I was asked by someone who saw me reading this the other night what it's about, and it was hard to sum up in a single sentence. I don't really know, and I'm not even sure Chen knows. Just when I think it's about one thing it sort of transforms into being about something else.

It is certainly entertaining though. Perhaps the part I like best is Chen's examination of willpower in sports. Why some athletes are better than others and how that often has far more to do with character traits than it does with actual skill.

Chen brings up the curious case of Andrea Jaeger, the professional tennis player who received criticism when it appeared that she threw some of her matches. Jaeger, it turns out, felt bad when she beat an opponent, particularly one who she felt really wanted to win. Jaegar cared too much about how others felt when they lost to her, more than she cared about actually winning herself.

Jaegar's is just one example of many that Chen cites in "So Many Olympic Exertions". There are others that are equally fascinating. For example, the case of Maocyr Barbosa, Brazil's goalkeeper during the 1950 World Cup. Brazil was largely expected to win that World Cup as it was being played in Brazil and Brazil, as always, was supposed to be really good.

Barbosa was the best goalkeeper in the country at the time, but he wasn't in the final against Uruguay. The rival team won, and Barbosa was demonized. His "one goal", Chen writes, "was to deflect the goals of others, and at this, he failed". Much later, Barbosa lamented that the maximum penalty for crimes was 30 years imprisonment, and he'd been punished for more than 50.

That made me sad ... and angry. Like seriously, it's a game — get the fuck over it, Brazil!

But like I said, I'm not much of a sports fan. Perhaps I have low testosterone as a result. So it's hard for me to understand the sort of emotion that athletes and, especially, fans get from a game. But we've all seen the consequences of such emotion.

The cover, as you might notice, references Sisyphus and his eternal punishment of having to push a large boulder up a hill only to have to repeat the exercise when it rolls back down. Sisyphus, Chen writes, is the "ultimate lonely athlete", but what might he have thought in that moment when he'd finally pushed the stone up to the summit, in that pause before it rolled back down again? Was he thinking about how he would push it better next time? Whether he would place his hands differently? Anything to try and perfect the effort, to try and make it feel new.

There is a disease Chen learns about called "déjà vécu" in which sufferers "feel as though everything has already happened". Whether it's a film, a sporting match, a book, a conversation, those with déjà vécu feel like they've seen it all, read it all, had it all before. "It seems there is no greater torture", Chen writes, "then knowing how the story is going to end".

I can understand that, because that knowing leads, essentially, to boredom. And what is hell if not an eternal state of boredom?

So success, and accordingly, happiness, is variety? Originality?

Perhaps.

There are no answers here. Chen is as uncertain about it as we all are, but "So Many Olympic Exertions" certainly furthers the conversation.

[Carl Lavigne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book and immediately took a depression nap; exactly as the author intended. I generally have no interest in sports, and yet i found this book completely mesmerizing.

[Beatriz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este é um livro para pensar nas dores do trabalho intelectual e académico, nas dores de uma geração ansiosa que sofre de síndrome do impostor, em relação aos seus pais trabalhadores "físicos"; este é um livro para refletirmos como ambos os trabalhos acabam por escravizar o sujeito, mesmo que de maneiras diferentes. Também representa muito bem o confronto geracional e as expectativas criadas por pais e filhos, uns sobre os outros, e a incompreensão mútua.

Sim, é pretensioso. Mistura temas como desporto, filosofia, cultura, psicanálise, psicologia. Sendo uma obra de ficção, noto-lhe, com subtileza, características semi-autobiográficas, assim como de trabalho de investigação mais académica. É, quase, uma obra filosófica.

A divisão em capítulos e subcapítulos curtos, por vezes tão curtos quanto uma só frase ou parágrafo, quase como um diário onde se vão apontando pensamentos rápidos e memórias, facilita e excita a leitura.

Achei o final abrupto, não porque tenha procurado uma narrativa fechada, mas porque senti um certo contínuo ser interrompido sem mais.

[Paris (parisperusing) · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Breath, she thinks, breathe, breathe, in, out. … Actually there’s no emergency here, she would have to say sheepishly to the hotline person, I’m not suicidal. I just feel like I’m going to die. As she thinks this phrase she can feel the tears coming. … She turns down her computer and goes to sit at her window, looking out at the red-bricked wall of the next building, cradling her knees. The snow is falling but at the same time rising under the streetlights… Could anything be more beautiful? A warm feeling starts in her stomach, as if all the knots are being untangled. … Tomorrow, I will be stronger. Tomorrow, I will get myself together.”

Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions is a jagged little pill of a book about the litany of ways we train ourselves to accept failure in the face of physical and emotional endurance. While I’ve never experienced such loss, Chen maroons us in the tide of lament she endures after receiving word that one of her friends has taken his own life. In an effort to cope with her unbending grief, Chen musters what little strength of self she has left to white-knuckle through a dissertation that’s been years in the making, years overdue. Compounded by the everyday stress of disappointment and the hellish cycle of millennial angst, Chen finds relief and fascination in researching the infamous trials, triumphs, and tragedies of athletes who — do or die — sacrificed themselves to win.

I could relate to Chen’s conflict entirely, as many days I feel so far away from the person I know I can be. A happier, confident person; a person worthy of forgiving themselves for being so timid and unsure. Barrelling into the archives with her, I found myself mourning and marveling at the legends of Paula Newby-Fraser, Mensen Ernst, and Kerri Strug for the sacrifices they made only to be confronted with such misfortune. It's true what they say: all that glitters isn't gold, including the medal itself. I never imagined I’d come across a hybrid of mental health, sports and memoir as seamlessly put together as Chen delivers here, which makes me all the more pleased she’s been recognized as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” this year.

Front to back, this was spectacular. I can't wait to see what she performs next.


If you liked my review, feel free to follow me @parisperusing on Instagram.

[Renata · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tenho me atraído cada vez mais pela ideia de uma narrativa da não-otimização constante na vida (tudo bem ter preguiça e se arrastar por aí desanimado de vez em quando. TUDO BEM.) Por mais que adore a ideia da ascenção constante de um David Copperfield da vida, é evidente que as coisas não necessariamente sempre melhoram e que a gente pode e deve desistir de certas coisas, por isso fiquei curiosa pelo tema desse livro assim que foi lançado. Formalmente, parece uma imensa colcha de retalhos com pensamentos soltos escritos durante o parto de uma tese de doutorado — o que me parece coerente com o ato de nadar, o gesto do esforço e do respiro. Sempre em frente. Sem sentido, mas em frente.

[Nathalie Gonçalves · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Vencer é uma espécie de vingança.”

ao analisar a protagonista, me deparei com a minha própria inércia. e isso foi um grandessíssimo tapa na cara.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so good that I stayed up til 3am two nights in a row to read it. It’s like Bluets, but questioning the psychic and physical pain and endurance of elite athletes.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Small book, big impact (on me, at least).

The story is fairly simple - a young woman struggles to finish her PhD thesis - but its effect has a magic sprinkle to it.

Collage is the mode. The narrative is made from bits of sports trivia, meditations on ambition, meditations on loss, suggestions for how anxious persons might behave themselves at social gatherings, and questions to the tune of, "Is anything worth effort, ever?" No answers are offered, which I think is just as well. The queries pluck at you (or, at me) and reverberate.

[Clara · Rating 3 out of 5]

preciso aceitar de uma vez que não me conecto com livro estadunidense. no máximo acho legalzinho. gostei de algumas histórias relacionadas a esporte, luto e pressão do ambiente acadêmico, mas não achei nada demais. a capa é linda tho

[Rahel · Rating 5 out of 5]

CN: Depression, suicide, the omnipresent horror that is being a PhD student

I've been trailing around this book for a while now, having recently gotten back on the bandwagon that is watching sports (something that I started doing almost exactly 10 years ago and then fell off of again). For those who follow sports intensely, there's a fixation on narratives in certain spaces and situations - I'm assuming this goes for most sport disciplines, but I'm mainly talking about soccer and ice hockey - and how players got to where they are, who they got there with. Chen, who shares a surname and near identical first name with her narrator, takes it a step further, examining the bookends of an athletic career, primarily the end. Paralleling the narrator's PhD struggles to various cases of athletic failure, but also triumph over near impossible hurdles, Chen makes a point of why one might keep going, again and again, each day, even if the odds are stacked magnificently against you. It's not an ode to life or to never give up, but instead to grit your teeth and take the task one lap at a time.
The suicide of one of her best friends nearly fades into the background over the course of the story, only to return towards the end in full force; Athena is caught up in herself and her own problems, in denial and survival mode more than anything else. I would have liked to see a stronger link between her PhD journey, her research and this loss, though I feel like it would have shifted the tone of the book towards what I worried it might be. The subtlety, paired with the writing style (notes, observations and topic summaries, like a misused commonplace journal) allow the reader to come to their own conclusions regarding these questions of what can keep a person going long after they should have stopped - and why they might then stop anyway. I appreciated this academic take on introspection and hope that I can find something like it again sometime.

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Anelise Chen writes with sharp knowledge about compulsive endurance, a surprisingly familiar pathology that she slyly argues may be synonymous with our end-of-empire lifestyles. A witty photographer, she composes her quick scenes to reveal the assimilated's final ambivalence. Equal parts panic attack poetry, unnerving research, and sculpted hesitation marks So Many Olympic Exertions is a cool literature made from the hot stage fright of the children of immigrants on some live TV whizkid contest perhaps called Life Now."

[Danilo Weiner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Queria ter gostado mais do livro. Achei incrível a sinopse, que juntando com a capa e a vontade de ler algo mais intimista, menos acelerado (depois de ter vindo numa sequência de livros pesados sobre guerra civil na áfrica e visões apocalípticas de AI), teria criado a tempestade perfeita.

Seria tentador falar que o livro cai numa prateleira genérica de auto-ajuda, acho que a experiência que a autora passou (suicídio de um dos melhores amigos, doutorado que não engrena, relação mal resolvida com o esporte) dá lastro pra ela divagar e sublinhar a necessidade de buscarmos uma vida plena, mas acho que o grande problema foi ter criado expectativas muito altas.

Destaco como positivo as histórias e exemplos retratados (a medalha de ouro improvável do time americano nos 4x100 em 2008, o maracanazzo, os infortúnios de alguns maratonistas perto da linha de chegada) e o estilo fragmentado de escrita, que dá pra você ler de uma maneira mais descompromissada, sem precisar conectar a todo momento as partes.

[Gabrielle Cunha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gostei das reflexões sobre esporte/vencer/perder e tal mas só

[123abc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked the style of this book - sort of like diary/journal entries but mostly flowing together. Overall a good (and quite sad) book that covers deep topics like goals, happiness & success (and failure) + lots of interesting „fun facts“ thrown in.

[Katarina · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book made me want to scream out loud on the subway, but not in a bad way (lol). very sad, but also funny at times. relatable anecdotes about goals, burnout, finding the meaning of life, & the elusive promise of success. being in your 20s is exhausting !

[Luciana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A presente obra de Anelise Chen dispõe daquilo que comumente entendemos como ‘autoficção’, uma vez que a autora parece estar narrando um período singular de sua vida, nos levando a compreender, ou mesmo a ao menos conhecer seus medos, dúvidas e questionamentos que enfrenta quando se depara com duas situações caóticas: um episódio fatídico com seu amigo Paul se une à angústia em concluir a tese de doutorado, que conta com prazo prorrogado.

Estando sua tese atrelada as questões relativas aos esportes, bem como aos questionamentos quanto o que move um atleta; qual motivo para se por voluntariamente a nadar desde Cuba aos EUA; quais e quantos sacrifícios alguém pode suportar nessa jornada e o que busca dela, acaba por interligar sua pesquisa com sua situação atual: o que a move? Por que se move? Onde ela quer chegar? Por que não desiste? Deve desistir? De onde vem o desprezo pelos desistentes?

E assim, como um diário, com passagens intercalaras de narrativa bastante fluida, acompanharemos todos os conflitos que a cerca, desde a condição familiar até diversos fatos e curiosidades históricas relacionados ao esporte, seja sobre Nadal, Andrea Jaeger e Nadia Comaneci.

Mais que um livro sobre aquilo que gravita entorno dos esforços olímpicos, a obra busca lançar questionamentos quanto ao que somos, o que buscamos, o que nos instiga, o que nos limita, sendo sem dúvida não recomendado a todos, mas se o leitor sente saudade de David Foster Wallace, aqui parece haver um pouquinho dele. Fica a recomendação.

[Siel Ju · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Eating, writing, sleeping, swimming. My vocation has all the features of vacation for most people.”
*
Anyone who mostly drives herself through goal-setting — and relatedly, struggles to enjoy downtime even as she procrastinates — will be able to relate to the hilarious but depressed protagonist Athena’s challenges. Read my full review at Los Angeles Review of Books’s BLARB.

[Vivian Marques · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5
Eu esqueci de marcar ele como lido aqui menina kkkkkkkkk
O formato meio solto me incomodou um pouco mas eu entendo que faz parte da proposta de uma pessoa bem perdida na vida como se tivesse juntado várias notas q ela ia fazendo nessa época complicada.
Eu gosto de livros de gente perdida na vida e ele fala de um tema muito importante, me fez pensar bastante em como a cultura da competição tá em todo canto.
A nota foi pq teve momentos 3 e momentos 4 estrelas, mas eu recomendo ele, foi interessante e é rapidinho

[Bogi Takács]

This was just heartwrenching. Simply brutal.

Taiwanese-American (2nd gen immigrant) humanities grad student studies sports. Written like memoir / creative nonfiction fragments, but is actually a novel.

Main themes include suffering, and giving up, and also losing a close friend to suicide. Might write more about it later, or not. Very heavy book, it was very well-executed, but I might need some emotional distance... So maybe later?

Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library

[Fernando Hisi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eu sou totalmente o público desse livro, e ele chegou em boa hora, mas não sei, talvez ele tenha sido só tudo o que eu tinha imaginado. Faltou um pouco de caldo. Tudo se lê muito bem como não-ficção, mas quando chega no coração, no crux da história, a personagem se recolhe. O mais bacana, seus pais, ficam somente como um pano de fundo. Um monte de dados flutuando ao redor dessa história não-concretizada.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went into this with high expectations and I think it just kinda fell flat and wasn’t as engaging as I’d hoped
It started of really well and even made me cry a bit but the writing style is 200ish pages of very short sentences/paragraphs all pieced together and I don’t think it worked for how long the story was
There also didn’t seem to be much reflection on events and was mostly just recounting events that happened in the period she’s writing about

[Kris M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think a couple of things could’ve been executed a bit more cleanly and I would’ve liked to see more in depth sports writing BUT 5 stars nonetheless because it carried a lot of the feeling, anxieties and fascination of its main topics (academia and sports) very well and I really enjoyed the form of the writing.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful iteration of autofiction, one that takes its cues from Maggie Nelson and Heidi Julavits and trafficks in questions of sport and what it means to lose. The ending feels a bit rushed, but perhaps that's just because things really pick up after a very ruminative first half.

[Lauryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been excited to read this book for a while! I found it hard to relate to the protagonist but thought the form and structure were really unique and compelling. Plus it's about sports, so the research was all super fascinating.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

so so so good-- will probably write more on this book later, i loved it so much

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably my new favorite book: former athlete turned academic in the midst of burnout musings of their purpose and dealing with grief and anxiety through the prism of sports.

[Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

The groundbreaking format of this novel makes it read like a memoir. It works well; I couldn't stop believing the protagonist was a real person. The novel poignant; it is painfully intimate, sad, and a little raw.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had this book on my TBR for years and finally managed to read it during some actual Olympics. Engaging blips of introspection and sports writing all submerged in a wry outlook.