The Observer Translation Project

Survivor of a Nazi concentration camp in the Ukraine, Romanian-born Manea… writes with lyrical precision about the unspeakable traumas of the Holocaust and the suffocating postwar reality of life in a totalitarian society. His stories are alternately parables of biblical force, crystalline Kafkaesque nightmares and unforgettable fragments of memory. The tales of wartime evoke the survivor's excruciating guilt upon watching a loved one die, or they examine death itself, rehearsed a thousand times before it occurs. Standardized buildings, trivial values, a constant fear of one's neighbors, and partitioned lives mark postwar communism, the milieu of "The Partition." In "The Turning Point," a few sensitive souls form a secret group, their only aim being "to learn to think again." Manea's shining characters walk with outward calm on the edge of an abyss in a world where the collapse of moral values is a given.
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