Compulsory Happiness

Deported to a concentration camp from 1941 until the end of the war, Norman Manea again left his native Romania in 1986 to escape the Ceausescu regime. He now lives in New York. In this selection of essays, he explores the language and psyche of the exiled writer.

Among pieces on the cultural-political landscape of Eastern Europe and on the North America of today, there are astute critiques of fellow Romanian and American writers. Manea answers essential questions on censorship and on linguistic roots. He unravels the relationship of the mother tongue to the difficulties of translation. Above all, he describes what homelessness means for the writer.

These essays — many translated here for the first time — are passionate, lucid, and enriching, conveying a profound perspective on our troubled society.

В сборник «Рыцарь Фуртунэ и оруженосец Додицою» входят рассказы румынских писателей 70—80-х годов о прошлом и настоящем Румынии, психологические, сатирические, исторические, рассказы-притчи и рассказы-зарисовки, дающие представление как о литературе, так и о жизни современной Румынии.

At the center of is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America. But while Norman Manea’s book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative work, traversing time and place, life and literature, dream and reality, past and present. Autobiographical events merge with historic elements, always connecting the individual with the collective destiny. Manea speaks of the bloodiest time of the twentieth century and of the emergence afterward of a global, competitive, and sometimes cynical modern society. Both a harrowing memoir and an ambitious epic project, achieves a subtle internal harmony as anxiety evolves into a delicate irony and a burlesque fantasy. Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, this is the work of a writer with an acute understanding of the vast human potential for both evil and kindness, obedience and integrity.

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 experience of Eastern Europe." —

Рубрика «Чай по Прусту» (восточно-европейский рассказ).

«Людек» польского писателя Казимежа Орлося (1935) — горе в неблагополучной семье. Перевод Софии Равва. Чех Виктор Фишл (1912–2006). Рассказ «Кафка в Иерусалиме» в переводе Нины Шульгиной. Автор настолько заворожен атмосферой великого города, что с убедительностью галлюцинации ему то здесь, то там мерещится давно умерший за тридевять земель великий писатель. В рассказе «Белоручки» венгра Бела Риго (1942) — дворовое детство на фоне венгерских событий 1956 года. Перевод Татьяны Воронкиной. В рассказах известного румынского писателя Нормана Мани (1936) из книги «Октябрь, 8 часов» — страшный опыт пребывания в лагере уничтожения с 1941 по 1945 гг. «Детство, с пяти до девяти лет, как самый большой ужас своей жизни…» — пишет во вступлении переводчица Анастасия Старостина.