A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, an eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high school teacher on "moral grounds," is investigating his father's death forty years after the fact, and is drawn into a web of suspicion and black humor.
"Reading 'The Black Envelope, ' one might think of the poisonous 'black milk' of Celan's 'Death Fugue' or the claustrophobic air of mounting terror in Mr. Appelfeld's 'Badenheim 1939.' . . . Mr. Manea offers striking images and insights into the recent...
A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, an eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been d...
Norman Manea, Romania's most famous contemporary author, twice has survived the grip of totalitarian regimes. No stranger to exile, he mines its complexities and disorientations in this extraordinarily compelling novel, The Lair. Exile in the motherland and away from it is the shared plight of his protagonists. Nowhere at home, they move through their lives in a continuous, ever-elusive quest for national and individual identity. Manea's characters seek a place and a voice in America, only to discover that the shackles of their native totalitarian and nationalist ideologies are...
Norman Manea, Romania's most famous contemporary author, twice has survived the grip of totalitarian regimes. No stranger to exile, he mines its co...
Dlouholetý rumunský emigrant profesor Augustin Gora je ve svém americkém exilu postaven do situace, kdy se musí nějak vyrovnat s příjezdem své bývalé manželky Lu a jejího bratrance a zároveň milence Petra Gaşpara. Zatímco oba muži se se střídavými úspěchy snaží obnovit někdejší dialog, Gaşpar, jemuž bylo nabídnuto improvizované místo na univerzitě, dostane podivný dopis s pohrůžkou smrti. Halucinační atmosféru románu umocňuje silně expresivní ztvárnění útoků z 11. září, připomínající atmosféru obrazů Hieronyma Bosche. Román s...
Dlouholetý rumunský emigrant profesor Augustin Gora je ve svém americkém exilu postaven do situace, kdy se musí nějak vyrovnat s příjezdem sv...