Manea, who emigrated to the West in
1986, portrays life under Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship in Romania
as a "sinister carnival," a nightmarish Fellini movie. The
country, governed by the dictator and his police "like a penal
colony," was nevertheless not totally monolithic, but instead
full of "ambiguity and duplicity, masks and falsehood."
These elegant, outspoken essays explore the relationship between the
writer, the state bureaucracy with its treacherous censorship and the
"not-so-innocent masses" who accommodated themselves to
lies and repression.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business
Information, Inc.
