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THE HOOLIGAN’S RETURN

Name: THE HOOLIGAN’S RETURN
Author: Norman Manea
ISBN: 0-374-28256-0

A MEMOIR

by Norman Manea & translated by Angela Jianu ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2003

Milder than fellow exile Andrei Codrescu’s The Hole in the Flag (1991), but an affecting exploration of past and present all...

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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.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-374-28256-0

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BLACK ENVELOPE
by Norman Manea

- BOOK REVIEW
COMPULSORY HAPPINESS
by Norman Manea

- BOOK REVIEW
OCTOBER, EIGHT O'CLOCK
by Norman Manea

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.