The Black Envelope
Norman Manea author Patrick Camiller translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Yale University Press
Published:24th Apr '12
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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.
“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
ISBN: 9780300182941
Dimensions: 197mm x 127mm x 22mm
Weight: 340g
336 pages