OCTOBER, EIGHT O'CLOCK

Romanian writer (now Bard College professor) Manea (an essay- collection, On Clowns, Feb. 1992) writes most affectingly in these stories—translated for this volume by six different, mostly slippery hands—of the true central trauma of his own life: deportation to a concentration camp at age five, then survival and repatriation back to a Bukovina laid waste of anything familiar to him. In the best story here, ``Weddings,'' the little boy to whom such freakish luck has happened is trained to deliver a little patriotic speech about the children of the camps—and he becomes a fixture at every public or private celebration. It is a ghastly irony, nicely drawn. But just about everything else either repeats that irony (returning to the world and its shortcomings) or loses its point in the sloppiness of Manea's over- or under-ambitious metaphors; as fiction goes, these are abstract, indistinct pieces.