A review by archytas
Personal Score by Ellen van Neerven

emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

Van Neerven's work is always transcendent, but Personal Score is the first time all the elements play (heh) so perfectly together that the result feels damn near perfect. Nothing about this book should work in theory: van Neerven blends reflections and research, mixing sport, memoir, Aboriginal cultural connection, gender identity, and climate change. The volume isn't particularly long, but I found myself pacing it to give myself time to digest the content, which feels like at least three books worth. The narrative shoots into various nooks and crannies and style can shift sharply. And yet, you never feel that they are not taking you exactly where you need to go: the style shifts give variety and different ways of telling the story. The book feels very much like a complete whole, succeeding in making van Neerven's point that Country is people too, and everything we do on it is part of the same cycle.
The mix also enables van Neerven to balance the nourishment sport provides (and they excel at describing intimate desires, anxieties, and comfort in sparse phrases) with the systemic issues they have researched (and at times vice versa). They have always been excellent at embodied writing, and here this moves from sensuality to pain to the joys of athleticism and the sensations of bushland walking, sea swimming. This connects ideas and experiences, making one world out of what we often divide into many. Honestly, I loved this and wouldn't have changed a thing.