He left Romania in 1986 with a
DAAD-Berlin Grant and in 1988 went to the US with a Fulbright Scholarship at the Catholic University in Washington DC. He won the 2002
International Nonino Prize in Italy.
Manea's most acclaimed book, The Hooligan's Return (2003), is an original fictionalized memoir, encompassing a period of almost 80 years, from the pre-war period, through the
Second World War, the communist and post-communist years to the present.
Manea has been known and praised as an internationally important writer since the early 1990s, and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages.[1] He has received more than 20 awards and honours.
Early years
Born to Jewish parents in the
Burdujeni [
ro] neighbourhood of
Suceava (Bukovina, Romania), Manea was deported as a child, in 1941, by the Romanian fascist authorities, allied with
Nazi Germany, to a
concentration camp in
Transnistria, together with his family. He returned to Romania in 1945 with the surviving members of his family and graduated with high honours from the high school (liceu) Ștefan cel Mare in his home town, Suceava. He studied engineering at the Construction Institute in Bucharest and graduated with a master's degree in hydro-technique in 1959, working afterwards in planning, fieldwork and research. He has devoted himself to writing since 1974.
Literary career
In 1966, his literary debut took place in Povestea Vorbii (The Story of Speech), an avant-garde and influential magazine that appeared in the early years of cultural liberalization in communist Romania and was suppressed after six issues. Until he was forced into exile (1986) he published ten volumes of short fiction essays and novels. His work was an irritant to the authorities because of the implied and overt social-political criticism and he faced a lot of trouble with the
censors and the official press. At the same time that sustained efforts were made by the cultural authorities to suppress his work, it had the support and praise of the country's most important
literary critics.
After the
Ceaușescu dictatorship collapsed, several of his books started to be published in Romania. The publication in a Romanian translation of his essay Happy Guilt, which first appeared in The New Republic, led to a nationalist outcry in Romania, which he in turn has analysed in depth in his essay "Blasphemy and Carnival". Echoes of this scandal can still be found in some articles in the current Romanian cultural press.
2004 Plicuri și portrete (Envelopes and Portraits) (essays), Polirom
2006 Textul nomad (The Nomad Text) (interviews), Hasefer
2008 Vorbind pietrei (Talking to a Stone), Polirom
2008 Înaintea despărțirii (Before Parting) (conversation with
Saul Bellow), Polirom
2009 Vizuina (The Lair) (novel), Polirom; 2010 – Polirom
2010 Laptele negru (The black milk) (essays and interviews), Hasefer
2010 Curierul de Est. Dialog cu Edward Kanterian, Polirom
2011 Cuvinte din exil. Dialog cu Hanes Stein, Polirom
References
^Manea's books have been reviewed in the American, British, French, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, and German press. They can be found in New York Times, New York Times Book Review, New Republic, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle (USA); Times Literary Supplement (UK); Le Monde, Figaro, Lire (France); El Pais, La Vanguardia (Spain); Stampa, La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, 24 (Italy); FAZ, Die Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) etc.
Essential references are to be found in: Neues Literatur Lexicon (1990, Germany), Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis and Biographical Dictionary (1991, USA), Contemporary Authors (Gale Group, 1995, 2008, USA), Who’s Who in America (Marquis, 1995–2010, USA), Dictionarul Esential al Scriitorilor Romani (2001, Romania), Dictionarul Analitic de Opere Literare (2001, Romania), Dictionarul Scriitorilor Romani (2001, Romania), Dictionary of Literary Biography, Twentieth Century Eastern European Writers, 2001, USA), Slovnik Rumunskych Spisovatelu (2001, Czech Republic), Enciclopedia Exilului Romanesc (2003, Romania), Dictionar Cronologic al Romanului Romanesc (2004, Romania), Dictionarul de literatura al Academiei Romane (2005, Romania), Enciclopedia della Letteratura (2008, Italy).
See also The Obsession of Uncertainty : In Honorem Norman Manea, Polirom 2011 (Magris, Tabucchi, Roth, Molina, Aridjis, Krüger etc.).