Captives - Softcover

Manea, Norman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811220478 ISBN 13: 9780811220477

Publisher: New Directions, 2014

Synopsis

A stunning novel set in postwar Romania about language, identity, and loss.

Captives, the acclaimed writer Norman Manea's first novel, is a fascinating, kaleidoscopic, and imaginative look into postwar Romania. Divided into three sections–narrated in first-, second-, and third-person voices–Captives explores the lives of several defeated characters as they become almost too much to bear under the weight of endless humiliations: loss of identity, trauma of having survived the Second World War, and submission to the totalitarian state. 

This is a moving account of a country shaken by communism and anti-Semitism and haunted by recent atrocities, from "a distinguished writer whose vision of totalitarianism is close to Kafka's cloudy menace, universal yet internalized" (Richard Eder, The New York Times).

About this title

About the Author

Norman Manea is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and writer-in-residence at Bard College. As a child, Manea was deported to Transnistria by the Romanian fascist government, and in 1986 he went into exile from Ceausescu’s dictatorship. Since arriving in the West he has received many important awards, has been the subject of a New Yorker profile, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Jean Harris is a novelist, essayist, and translator living in Bucharest, Romania. She was the 2007-2008 grant recipient from the University of California, Irvine’s International Center for Writing and Translation.

Review

“Mr. Manea's voice is radically new, and we are blessedly awakened and alerted by the demand his fiction makes on our understanding.”
- Lore Segal, The New York Times Book Review

“A superb writer who gives an extraordinary testimony of a rich and dramatic life under one of the most grotesque and ferocious dictatorships.”
- Mario Vargas Llosa

“This world of ours, in his view, is a place where the ridiculous reigns supreme over all human life and tortures everyone without respite, and therefore it cannot be ignored because it's not about to ignore any of us. If that is so, fools are also martyrs. Words caused them to suffer and words are their salvation. Manea's strength as a writer comes from his deep solidarity with such people. He has in mind all those, including himself, who were left to play the fool in one of history's many traveling circuses.”
- Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books

“With his talent and creativity, Manea belongs to the great men of Romania.”
- Orhan Pamuk

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0811220478
• ISBN 13: 9780811220477
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288