The Hooligan’s Return

Norman Manea | March 30, 2009

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After a harsh childhood in Transnistria, a concentration camp for Romanian Jews, and a frustrated, tedious adulthood as an engineer within the Communist system, Manea finds writing--and controversy--in middle age, and he emigrates to New York. His memoir is the eloquent story of his return to Romania amid academic controversy and lingering questions about his identity. Familiar Manean literary caricatures travel with him and become vehicles for understanding the haunted past: the White Clown (representing brutal dictators past, present, and future) and Augustus the Fool, his exiled-artist foil. Manea visits his hometown and his mother's grave and flashes back to his past, but he never finds the catharsis he seeks. "The return did not restore me," he mourns. "I am an embarrassed inhabitant of my own biography." Perhaps true, but his engrossed readers will likely forgive him. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this issue

This July, The Observer Translation Project leaves its usual format to present a special CRISIS ISSUE. Things are tough all over. Hard Times suddenly feels like the book of the moment. The global economic crisis impacts life as we know it, and viewed from Bucharest the effects reverberate in domains that include geo-politics and publishing in Romania and abroad, with the crisis at The Observer Translation Project as an instance of a universal phenomenon. read more...

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