Romanian novelist Manea's fifth book
(after Compulsory Happiness) is a dark, enigmatic tale in which a
man's investigation of his father's death, 40 years before, is set
against the repressions and deceptions of the Ceausescu regime in the
1980s. Having been fired from his teaching post at a provincial high
school for vaguely defined trespasses against young boys, Anatol
Dominic Vancea Voinov, called Tolea, works as a receptionist at a
tourist hotel in Bucharest, where he makes a career out of mocking
his less educated colleagues. When the ever-difficult Tolea learns he
may lose even this job, he pointedly embraces folly and takes a
vacation. The majority of the tale concerns Tolea's searches: for the
head of a nefarious association of deaf and mute people, whose
physical disabilities mirror the moral ailments of Communist Romania;
for a photographer, whose work documents the unofficial, but real,
life of the country; for coffee; and even for a scratch over an
eyebrow.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
