Search results for ""Author Norman Manea""

A melancholy tale of searching—for documents, for truth, for coffee—from the Romanian master 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. Norman Manea’s enigmatic and artful novel—set against the backdrop of life under the repressive Ceausescu regime—depicts the chaos and deprivation of Tolea’s existence, and his tenuous grip on reality.

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A virtuoso collage novel about narrative, identity, and exile, from international literary sensation Norman Manea “One of the most eloquent living witnesses of the European 20th century, Norman Manea, at 87, has brought out Exiled Shadow, a contemplative work of fiction . . . [in] a strong, clarion translation into English by Carla Baricz. . . . A fitting summarization of a rich and deeply honorable career.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal “Exiled Shadow belongs among the great, intricate, and uncompromising works of contemporary literature.”—Jan Knoffeke, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland) In this vibrant mosaic of voices, sources, and stories, the protagonist, known only as the Nomadic Misanthrope, leaves communist Romania and is reunited with his friend Gunther, an unrepentant Marxist exiled in Berlin. Their meeting sparks a spirited dialogue that endures throughout the Nomadic Misanthrope’s subsequent decades in the United States. At the center of the plot is the figure of the shadow—the insubstantial shape of the exile, the wandering Jew, the death camp survivor, the individual under totalitarianism, the dark side of the Jungian personality—a figure that calls into question the boundaries of the human condition. Recalling the beloved nineteenth-century German tale of Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow for a bag of gold, this is Norman Manea’s most daring work yet: an intimate record of alienation and endurance.

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Now available for the first time in English, Manea's acclaimed novel of émigrés in America, free yet imprisoned by the past 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 impossible to break.Manea's themes and narrative approach are intricate: his style fluctuates in correspondence with the instability of his characters' lives, his story is encased within an elaborate network of allusions and paradoxes. Yet in the midst of the novel's overriding disorientation, the author establishes intersections and uncovers the universal. Through the predicaments of his perpetual outsiders, he offers a poignant assessment of the conflicts of the individual in the age of globalization. He writes with unmatched intensity and a unique sensitivity to the human tragicomedy.

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