The Observer Translation Project

           "Great writer that he is, Manea daringly expresses his thinking, never abandoning a great intellectual's spirit of vigilance. Honored by many international prizes, he is a deserving candidate for the Nobel Prize."

                           --Antonio Tabucchi

 

           "Norman Manea is a novelist of extraordinary originality, and an intellectual of extraordinary lucidity."

                                                                     --Antonio Muñoz Molina

           "A great contemporary writer"

          "Imagine on the other side of a totalitarian looking glass, an obverse image of Nabokov's Speak, Memory."

 

          "A performance both excruciating and ferociously controlled. The result may well rank among the finest memoirs in a generation."

                                                    --The San Francisco Chronicle, August, 2003

 

          "A vision of totalitarianism closer to Kafka's cloudy menace, universal, and yet internalized, than to Orwell's brass tacks."

                                                    --The New York Times, September 21, 2003

 

          "An extraordinary book."

 

          "The caustic dexterity and lyrical power we would expect from the accomplished novelist."

                       --The New York Times Book Review, September 21, 2003

 

          " 'Augustus the Fool is the exile', he writes. Manea's strength as a writer comes from his deep solidarity with such people. He has in mind all those, including himself, who were left to play the fool in one of history's many traveling circuses."

                                                   --The New York Review of Books, October, 2003

 

          "No witness to the several barbarisms of the past century has so persistently instructed his reader in the process by which 'Thursday's atrocities have become grist for the mottoes on Friday's T-shirts.' A genuinely great book, an entire teeming life seized and made permanent."

                                                  --The New Republic, January 19, 2004

 

          "A book of memory, but also a book against memory, not in order to regain the past but to unmask it, to peal off successive layers. In this unusual, private book, the Romanian author shows us that even as the view from the snail's house can embrace much of the modern world, the shell's curve inevitably leads us back to the raw, personal source."

                                                  --Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2004

 

          "Romania has no finer and more percipient chronicler of its sorrows and absurdities...one of an immensely humane and intelligent stature."

        

         "We know when we've come on a work of literature that alters, for the rest of our lives, how we see, how we understand even that which we may have believed we understood before. Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ward Number Six. And now The Hooligan's Return."

 

*

 

          "Crowned by The Médicis Prize, this unforgettable book is already a classic.

                                                                --Lire, December 2006

 

         "This stupendous book of life and death urges us to discover a leading voice in contemporary literature"

                                                               --Les Inrockuptibles, August 29, 2006

 

         "A magisterial book on the tragedy of Eastern countries, exile, and the solitude of the writer. His trip to the country of the dead will become a classic without delay."

                          --Hebdomadaire, October 6, 2006

 

         "From the Nazi camps to Ceauşescu, this autobiographical narrative by Norman Manea, the potential Romanian Nobel laureate, is a magisterial critique of totalitarianism."

 

         "Awarding its prize to Orhan Pamuk in 2004, the Médicis Jury anticipated the Nobel. Perhaps the same will soon happen to Norman Manea."

                                --Le Figaro, October 31, 2006

 

         "The painful autobiography of an author who may be the first Romanian Nobel laureate. The Hooligan's Return is an implacable autopsy of the totalitarian system, the testimony of an exemplary, resilient man, the lament of an exile and the dramatic history of a wrecked country."

 

         "Autobiographical but not autobiography. A novel of memory, haunted by Joyce and Proust, a return to 'past is fiction,' to borrow a phrase from a chapter. A narrative of a life, a novel of a writer inhabited by literature and books."

 

         "The Hooligan's Return is a masterpiece."

 

         "The odyssey of a burning century by an imaginary clown, center stage."

 

         "History, philosophical reflection, a journey into the human soul, great literature."

                         --Le Nouvelle Observateur, November 16, 2006

 

         “This book should help French readers discover both the world of the past and today's world – a writer of first importance.”

                                                              --Livres_Hebdo, June 23, 2004

         "The self-portrait of a homeless person. The quality of the work isn't necessarily related to history, but to the author's analytic power. The masterly scene at the grandfather's grave plays the role of a key to the Initiation - and the family story comes alive thanks to the self-satire and self-doubt of a modern European Jewish author."

 

         "An outsider, a hooligan. And yet a European, from start to finish."

 

         "Powerful. Talent, fantasy, spirituality... genius. "

 

         "Not only a refined autobiography, in the best category of the genre, but also a substantial contribution to the history of survival in the twentieth century."

 

         "Laughter and sarcasm in the tradition of surrealism is the author's answer to dictatorship."

 

         "A great art masterpiece, an autobiography without self-stylizing, a life-summary that never betrays the highest standard of literature. An amazing book, one of the best memoirs on the horrors of the twentieth century."

 

         "A description of a return which was not one. A book that has to be read sitting down. And a miracle of language."

 

         "The portrait of a perpetual exile whose writing became his homeland. The Hooligan's Return is among the highest quality books this spring."

 

         "Manea's memoir is an essential witness to a dark epoch."

 

 *

 

         "A writer, an artist is recognizable from his first lines. The Hooligan's Return reveals the peerless mark of a masterpiece....The stuff of great literature."

 

         "Linear time is opposed by circular time, full of philosophical tales, socio-political, moral aphorisms and the presence of Chagallian characters, a continuous play of masks, in a shock of dislocation... "

 

         "Great narrative and style... the horrors of totalitarianism from ghetto to exile, a trajectory that confronts the century of Kafka, Joyce, Proust"

 

         "A century fought in Charlot's manner, not Achile's. A masterpiece that tells the story of the exile returning to his homeland."

 

         "The autobiography of a great writer, the eternal stranger."

 

*

 

         "Everything written by Norman Manea about exile or about love, about lying and about social harassment or about intellectuals is the credo of an ethical structure of the world,  where freedom is sacred and has to be kept that way.

 

         "One of the achievements of this book is how it conveys the post-totalitarian reality of a world that isn't yet free, charged with the embryos of previous terror."

 

         "Beautiful writing, with nerve. Reading this book represents an overwhelming experience. A bleeding book."

                          --La Vanguardia, Culturas, August 24, 2005

 

         "Subtle irony, high lucidity. The reader easily divines the creative force of a talented writer who feels and lives literature, The Hooligan's Return is a journey for which we don't need luggage, trains or plains; all we need to do is take a good look at what is going on around us. "

 

         "A splendid book that we prefer to call a novel. The story of a double return, a double 'descent into hell': a foreigner's real journey back to his native land after years of exile, together with the foreigner's return to his own memories, to the scrutiny of his own life. Living for years in New York, the stranger, Norman Manea, was a double stranger in his country of origin and continues to be one in the city where he has lived after leaving Ceauşescu's Romania"

 

         "One of the great contemporary writers. His magnificent novel The Hooligan's Return tells the story of two exiles in a "symbolic symmetry," the nefarious symmetry of the two totalitarianisms of the twentieth century that exterminated a great number of non-aligned, 'extra-territorial' persons, strangers, undesirable pariahs and inadaptable people."

 

         "As other important books by Brodsky or Milosz, The Hooligan's Return is the result and the testimony of a leap into the void, the somersault as the only possible action of a real vocation. What counts most in The Hooligan's Return already exists in memory or in the nostalgia of the traveler who goes to a cemetery to meet somebody much loved who died without his being there. Only then did the stranger discover and accept - after such a long exile - the place to which he belongs, his former homeland. He belongs to the language in which he goes on writing – in that New York where the ghosts of the past and of literature seem sometimes more tangible than real people."