Norman Manea Books In Order

The Black Envelope

A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, an eccentric middle aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high school teacher on ‘moral grounds,’ is investigating his father’s death forty years after the fact, and is drawn into a web of suspicion and black humor.’Reading ‘The Black Envelope,’ one might think of the poisonous ‘black milk’ of Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ or the claustrophobic air of mounting terror in Mr. Appelfeld’s ‘Badenheim 1939.’…
Mr. Manea offers striking images and insights into the recent experience of Eastern Europe.’ New York Times Book Review

October, Eight O’clock Stories

A collection of short stories stemming from the Romanian author’s detention in a Na*zi concentration camp as a child evokes a sense of the horror and absurdity of war and Romanian politics.

Compulsory Happiness

Four novellas constitute a biography of a generation living in a police state and ravaged by fifty years of history, enduring war, the Holocaust, revolution, social change, and the triviality of the ordinary.

On Clowns

Survivor of the Na*zi camps and Ceausescu’s Romania, winner of the National Book Award, recipient of a MacArthur Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Norman Manea, an extraordinary man of letters, ‘gives us a taste of something beyond the scope of even our twentieth century imagination…
. Manea is too profound a witness to place his gift for observation in the service of another sensualist account…
. What matters for him is the phenomenon of an entire nation’s life under this simultaneously grotesque and terrifying rule.’ The New Republic

The Hooligan’s Return

The Hooligan’s Return is Norman Manea’s long awaited memoir, a portrait of an artist that ranges freely from his early childhood in prewar Romania to his return there in 1997.

In October l941, the entire Jewish population of Manea’s native Bukovina was deported to concentration camps. Manea was among them, a child at the time, and his family spent four years there before they were able to return home. Embracing a Communist ethos as a teenager, he becomes disillusioned with the system in place in his country as he matures, having witnessed the growing injustices of dictatorship, and the false imprisonment of his father. But as a writer, Manea wrestles with the fear of losing his native language, his real homeland if he leaves his country, though it is clear to him that to stay under such a regime would be well nigh impossible. Finally, in 1988, he settles in the United States, returning to Romania a decade later.

A harrowing memoir, The Hooligan’s Return freely traverses time and place, life and literature, dream and reality, past and present. Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, this is the story of a writer more interested in ethics and aesthetics than in politics, a literary man consumed by questions of solitude and solidarity.