The Hooligan's Return: A Memoir

The New York Times

Mr. Manea is short on doors and steps; his interest lies in evoking the feel and implication of his life more than in recounting its details. Yet the artistry of the implication, the intensity of what can seem a dream state, draws us imperceptibly through a half-lighted window for lack of the door. A chronology does manage to emerge. So do a series of haunting and ironic scenes. — Richard Eder

NY Times Sunday Book Review

Combined with Manea's reluctance to provide us with even a semblance of chronological order for the life he is reconstructing, these tender and corrosive philosophical debates give the memoir a haphazard, skip-and-jump quality that some readers may find confusing but that made the book all the more fascinating. It is this stubbornness of vision, this determination not to placate any demand for simplicity, this resolve to cling to his own searing imagination, which finally led Norman Manea into banishment and now allows him to offer us unsparingly all the jumble and messiness of his odyssey. His ultimate home, he seems to be whispering to us and perhaps to himself, is not Romania and not the United States, but the very literature where he struggles for meaning, the luminous book itself that he is writing and we are reading in a world where he has just buried his mother and now faces the final fatherless exile of death. — Ariel Dorfman

Publishers Weekly

Manea's life is simple synoptically, though his memoir is not. During WWII, when Manea is five, his Jewish family is deported to a concentration camp; he survives the "Initiation of Transnistria" to return to Romania, "an old man of nine," in 1945. With a semblance of the ordinary, Manea goes to school and becomes a hydroelectric engineer. But as "external adversity seemed to disappear... the internal one... remained as its residue." Having survived the Holocaust, Manea must next survive the repressions of the Ceaucescu regime, and after arriving in the U.S. in 1988, he must survive exile. Survival in all these cases calls for remembering and memorializing the lives of his parents and extended family, as well as his fellow writers and artists, and for testifying against the evildoers, active and passive. Manea's account comes in several voices: a first-person intimacy where all seems true (i.e., factual) alternates with the voice of fiction, a third-person tale, which sounds like truth, and the distancing voice of an objective narrator ("the mother"; "the son") that moves toward the abstract. The author applies the fluidity of prose fiction to his autobiography, juxtaposing the aphoristic and oblique with the fanciful and direct. On the barely visible backdrop, the ghostly, ghastly figures of 20th-century historical Romania hover like "Securitate eavesdroppers." This is a dense, absorbing and internally complex work in which a stroll on Manhattan's Upper West Side is a prologue to a time shifting (as the pages move forward, time slips back and forth) and place shifting. Readers are often in Transnistria when they thought they were comfortably in Bukovina or Itcani. Manea's memoir, which so often speaks metaphorically, is surely intended to provoke a sense of that displacement. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

As Manea (Black Envelope) is a Romanian-born Jewish writer who has lived in exile in New York since 1988, this is the memoir of a refugee artist. The evocative narrative thus wrestles with issues of nationalism, infantilism, and cultural identification, setting the individual artist against the monopolies of nations, dictators, and other brutalities of history. In a manner at once serious and artful, Manea tries to balance the notion of daily measures of heroism with the happy guilt of narcissistic suspicions and pathetic masochisms. For example, he connects the quotidian routine of phone calls, lunches, and trying to set up a life in New York with the continuity of memories and historical explanations of his ongoing relationships with artists, scholars, exiles, and homeless cosmopolitans. The result is an exploration of the "hooligan" as rootless, exiled, dissident, and conspicuous, with much of the text written in the spirit of Tolstoy, Bruno Schultz, and Paul Celan. Recommended for libraries interested in European thought, the legacy of Ceausescu, and Jewish identification, particularly in the last decade of the 20th century.-Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A political exile returns to his homeland behind the former Iron Curtain. And finds things as strange as ever. Essayist/novelist Manea (The Black Envelope, 1995, etc.) doesn't really qualify as a hooligan: mild-mannered and essentially apolitical, he exhibits in these pages an aesthete's sense of the world and of literature-and an ironic sense at that. Yet "hooligan" is what he and fellow apostates from the Romanian workers' paradise were branded by the apparatchiks, a term of abuse made a little more pointed by the 1991 murder in Chicago of his compatriot and fellow intellectual Ioan Petru Culianu, a strange case that opened long-closed dossiers on such matters as mythology scholar Mircea Eliade's involvement in fascist politics during WWII. A veteran of the Transnistrian camps to which Romanian Jews were deported in those days, Manea opens this memoir with an account of his reluctance to return to his homeland and look some of those matters straight in the eye. "I came out relatively clean from the dictatorship," he writes. "I didn't get my hands dirty." On the streets of Bucharest and in the villages of Bukovina, however, he encounters plenty of people with dirty hands and examines them with the same scholarly detachment (which is not to say disengagement) that he casts upon his own memories of Red Pioneers' summer camps, furtive affairs, open secrets, quotidian betrayals, and other aspects of life under totalitarianism. He may have escaped from all that, Manea writes, but the new, ostensibly democratic Romanian government keeps tabs on him and his fellow exiles all the same. Arch, literary, and self-effacing, Manea revisits the scenes of his youth, encounters "miraculous apparitions"from the past, and contents himself with the knowledge that his true home now lies elsewhere: "Yes, the Upper West Side, in Manhattan." Milder than fellow exile Andrei Codrescu's The Hole in the Flag (1991), but an affecting exploration of past and present all the same.