Compelling tales of terror and paranoia under a repressive regime by the Romanian writer Norman Manea
In cool, precise prose, and with an unerring sense of the absurd, the four novellas of Compulsory Happiness create a picture of everyday life in a grotesque police state, expressing terror and hope, fear and solidarity, the humorous triviality of the ordinary, and the painful search for an ideal.
Norman Manea is Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and writer-in-residence at Bard College. Deported from his native Romania to a Ukrainian concentration camp during World War Two, he was again forced to leave Romania in 1986, no longer safe under an intolerant Communist dictatorship. Since arriving in the West he has received many awards, including the Star of Romania, awarded by the Romanian president in 2016. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York City. An award-winning translator, Linda Coverdale has translated many classic works of modern French literature into English.
“Mr. Manea’s voice is radically new, and we are blessedly awakened and alerted by the demand his fiction makes on our understanding.”—Lore Segal, New York Times Book Review
“Norman Manea’s four novellas, written during the later Ceausescu years, offer a comparable contrast to other Eastern European dissident writing. Instead of the energetic irony, the ebullient absurdism, the sharp-eyed wit, we find a dreamy disconnection, a voice that shock has lowered, an air of sweetness driven mad.”—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
"An excellent short story writer and novelist, a truly modern spirit. No matter how worthy of esteem and admiration his behaviour and his critic opinions have been, the essential remains that Manea is an artist, a genuine writer." - Octavio Paz, Nobel Laureate
"A masterly artist whose fresh presence among us should deepen, augment and finally arouse American letters." - Cynthia Ozick
"He understands, perfectly, that we are, like it or not, moral beings condemned to judge ourselves and others in a world without a presiding presence, where judgment itself will often seem arbitrary and ludicrous. To be a feeling being is, for this writer, to acknowledge that complex fate, and to register as sharply as possible the hopeless turmoil and absurdity of the inner life. I know of no writer who has managed this–the turmoil, the innerness, the gravity, the absurdity, the judgment, the terror, the painful, ironic self-disparagement–so well, and so consistently, as Norman Manea." - Robert Boyers
