The Black Envelope - Norman Manea

. .

Résumé :
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.

Biographie:
Norman Manea is Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and writer-in-residence at Bard College. A novelist and essayist, he first published in Communist Romania in the 1960s, producing a string of socially critical works that led to his departure in 1986. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages, and he has received many important cultural and literary prizes, including the MacArthur Fellowship (U.S.), the Nonino International Literary Prize (Italy), the Prix Medicis Etranger (France), and the Nelly Sachs prize (Germany). He is a member of the Berlin Academy of Art and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the French government has named him Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Patrick Camiller has translated many works, including Dumitru Tsepeneag's Vain Art of the Fugue, The Necessary Marriage, and Hotel Europa.

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. (New York Times Book Review) A vortex of imponderables: an elusive mystery story, a penetrating X-ray of Romania in the 1980s, a Kafkaesque parable of a world turned upside down in our nightmarish century. It's an enigmatic and deeply compelling novel. (Edward Hirsch)