The Hooligan's Return
A Memoir
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- US$14.99
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At the center of The Hooligan’s Return is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America. But while Norman Manea’s book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative work, traversing time and place, life and literature, dream and reality, past and present. Autobiographical events merge with historic elements, always connecting the individual with the collective destiny. Manea speaks of the bloodiest time of the twentieth century and of the emergence afterward of a global, competitive, and sometimes cynical modern society. Both a harrowing memoir and an ambitious epic project, The Hooligan’s Return achieves a subtle internal harmony as anxiety evolves into a delicate irony and a burlesque fantasy. Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, this is the work of a writer with an acute understanding of the vast human potential for both evil and kindness, obedience and integrity.
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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.
