On clowns: The dictator and the artist : essays - Softcover

Manea, Norman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802114156 ISBN 13: 9780802114150

Publisher: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992

Synopsis

Survivor of the Nazi camps and Ceausescu's Romania, winner of the National Book Award, recipient of a MacArthur Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Norman Manea, an extraordinary man of letters, "gives us a taste of something beyond the scope of even our twentieth-century imagination. . . . Manea is too profound a witness to place his gift for observation in the service of another sensualist account. . . . What matters for him is the phenomenon of an entire nation's life under this simultaneously grotesque and terrifying rule." -- The New Republic

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Reviews

Romanian-‚migr‚ novelist Manea here offers a rambling clutch of essays that effectively reproduce the sense of chaos and insecure self-definition that was (and still must be) the lot of the writer-citizen in the slipperiest, perhaps most psychotic of all the pre-1989 European hell-states, Ceausescu's Romania. Collective fate was to live under the ``insidious, dilated presence of the monster called the Power,'' inducing a mass psychological disturbance that resulted from ``the hours sacrificed to standing in lines, to ritual political meetings and to rallies, on top of the hours at work and the hours of helpless exposure to the inferno of public transportation...and when you were finally home in your birdcage, you found yourself mute, staring into an emptiness that could be defined as infinite despair.'' Manea presents a censor's ``reader's report'' on one of his about-to-be-published novels-- and, movingly, his own reaction upon rereading the book later: ``The writer who thought himself so aesthetically `engaged' discovered any number of pages, fragments, chapters that had been corrupted by the very artifices he had used (often with a sense of triumph) as a defense against the censor's office.'' An essay comparing Ceausescu to a White Clown, and the artist to the classic clown Auguste; a piece on Mircea Eliade's malignant Iron Guard-apologist past, and anecdotes of literary hardship--all are intermittently impressive, but Manea is a weak essayist, drifting and often self-serving, and this dilutes the truths he knows. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Manea, who emigrated to the West in 1986, portrays life under Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship in Romania as a "sinister carnival," a nightmarish Fellini movie. The country, governed by the dictator and his police "like a penal colony," was nevertheless not totally monolithic, but instead full of "ambiguity and duplicity, masks and falsehood." These elegant, outspoken essays explore the relationship between the writer, the state bureaucracy with its treacherous censorship and the "not-so-innocent masses" who accommodated themselves to lies and repression. Life was a state of permanent suspension, of cunning and silence, for the person with integrity and for the creative artist. Manea offers an intriguing expose of Mircea Eliade, historian of religion, as fascist sympathizer and right-wing ideologue. He names names in an autopsy of Ceausescu's "hit squad," the special guard that enforced cultural conformity through denunciation of "foreigners," "liberals" and "European types."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

These riveting essays provide us with a fascinating look at Romanian life under the tyranny of Ceausescu. Manea's struggle to retain his humanity and artistic integrity is an emotionally powerful story. Both Manea's personal and professional life were subject to unthinkable oppression that is made all too real by his vivid prose. How could he retain any integrity as a writer in an environment so pervasively despotic? Manea's answer will fascinate literary critics. One of the essays reprints the full text of a Romanian censor's report on Manea's novel, The Black Envelope . The twisted thinking in this report makes the struggle appallingly clear. Manea's observations on our own society are equally thought-provoking. The translation is smoothly readable and the notes fill in the gaps for the casual reader. This work will appeal to all readers, deserves a wide audience, and belongs in all libraries.
- Ruth M. Ross, Olympic Coll. Lib., Bremerton, Wash.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Weidenfeld
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802114156
• ISBN 13: 9780802114150
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 178