The Lair
Norman Manea author Oana Sanziana Marian author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Yale University Press
Published:22nd Oct '13
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Now available for the first time in English, Manea's acclaimed novel of émigrés in America, free yet imprisoned by the past
Norman Manea, Romania's most famous contemporary author, twice has survived the grip of totalitarian regimes. No stranger to exile, he mines its complexities and disorientations in this extraordinarily compelling novel, The Lair. Exile in the motherland and away from it is the shared plight of his protagonists. Nowhere at home, they move through their lives in a continuous, ever-elusive quest for national and individual identity. Manea's characters seek a place and a voice in America, only to discover that the shackles of their native totalitarian and nationalist ideologies are impossible to break.
Manea's themes and narrative approach are intricate: his style fluctuates in correspondence with the instability of his characters' lives, his story is encased within an elaborate network of allusions and paradoxes. Yet in the midst of the novel's overriding disorientation, the author establishes intersections and uncovers the universal. Through the predicaments of his perpetual outsiders, he offers a poignant assessment of the conflicts of the individual in the age of globalization. He writes with unmatched intensity and a unique sensitivity to the human tragicomedy.
“An intelligent, erudite, inexhaustible story-teller, in his essays as much as in his fiction, Norman Manea is above all a witness, someone who has lived to tell the tale. In [The Lair], as in all his work, we find the defining experiences of the twentieth century—the death camps, deportation, totalitarianism (both Fascism and Communism), marginalisation, deracination, exile, self-regeneration—filtered through the sensibility of one of its most astute survivors.”—Costa Bradatan, Times Literary Supplement
A New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice”
“[An] acclaimed novel of love, isolation and the disorientation of being submerged in another culture.”—Granta
Longlisted by Three Percent for their 2013 Best Translated Book in Fiction
A New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice” * New York Times *
“Compelling.”—Tess Lewis, Arts Fuse
-- Tess Lewis * Arts Fuse *“Great imaginative energy. . . . An elaborate, intricate, delicate narrative structure, balanced just so. . . . The Lair shows us life as a richly incomplete and unresolved experience.”—Reginald Gibbons, TriQuarterly -- Reginald Gibbons * TriQuarterly *
ISBN: 9780300198799
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 340g
256 pages