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Norman Manea

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The Black Envelope (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Paperback – April 24, 2012

by Norman Manea (Author), Patrick Camiller (Translator)

3.3 7 ratings

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A melancholy tale of searching—for documents, for truth, for coffee—from the Romanian master

A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, an eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high school teacher on “moral grounds,” is investigating his father’s death forty years after the fact, and is drawn into a web of suspicion and black humor. Norman Manea’s enigmatic and artful novel—set against the backdrop of life under the repressive Ceausescu regime—depicts the chaos and deprivation of Tolea’s existence, and his tenuous grip on reality.

Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Yale University Press
Publication date

April 24, 2012
Dimensions

5 x 0.88 x 7.75 inches
ISBN-10

0300182945
ISBN-13

978-0300182941
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Reading The Black Envelope, one might think of the poisonous ‘black milk’ of Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ or the claustrophobic air of mounting terror in Mr. Appelfeld’s ‘Badenheim 1939.’ . . . Mr. Manea offers striking images and insights into the recent experience of Eastern Europe.”—New York Times Book Review

About the Author

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. Patrick Camiller has translated many works, including Dumitru Tsepeneag’s Vain Art of the Fugue, The Necessary Marriage, and Hotel Europa.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; Reprint, Translation edition (April 24, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300182945
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300182941
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.88 x 7.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,351,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #122,853 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.3 7 ratings

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Ilogic23

Splendid insight into communism.

Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2015

Splendid insight into communism.

Helpful

James W. Fonseca

Paranoia and Misery in Eastern Europe

Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2016

I found this book baffling in parts so I did what I never do which is to look at other reviews to see if anyone else had figured it out. Much of the plot, such as it is, is about an elderly man who lives alone and seems to be searching for documents related to the political turmoil that ruined his father’s career. However, he himself was run out of a job as a professor and now works as a hotel receptionist in this eastern European communist environment. The novel is set in Romania and translated from Romania.

Other reviews I have read characterize the book as "a slog, " a struggle, obscure, vague, confusing, baffling and exasperating. Some call it brilliant and exquisite.

So why slog through it?

To me its main value is that it is almost a primer or a manual of what life was like during the days of the repression of personal freedom under communism in Eastern Europe. As if communist repression were not enough, the population in Romania also suffered from the whims of the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu from 1967 to 1989. He was tyrannical even by Stalinist standards. (He and his wife were shot by firing squad in 1989 after a one-hour trial.) The people also suffered under an overwhelming and insidious bureaucracy that permeated their lives. So here’s that primer:

The office environment. At work there is constant gossip and rumors about the Party that you have to follow closely for “hints” of what’s going on. Favoritism is shown to Party members. Political leaders who used to be drawn from “workers” are now members of the intellectual class. Your manager calls you at home on your day off to chit-chat. It can only be one of two things -- a joke or a warning? The best thing you can have is a friend at a high level; the worst thing is an enemy at high level.

The doublespeak of the bureaucrats is Orwellian. Surprisingly, if you are a brave soul and want to risk all, you can act weird, irritate people, and say politically dangerous things because your co-workers will assume you must have higher-up connections or you wouldn’t dare act that way. So, our professor openly talks of his brother who defected to Argentina. Your day is marked by petty suspicion, petty backbiting, petty deception, petty acts of treachery committed by petty, shriveled, crushed souls. And boredom. Don’t forget the boredom.

Suspicion. It’s an age of suspicion. Everyone is subject to blackmail from the old days of WW II. There are informers and spies. Even the spies assume they are being spied on. Everyone has a file so everyone lives with constant anxiety waiting for the bureaucrats to get around to looking into their file and their “past.” Many people have things to hide from WW II. We’re not told what these are. So people have changed their appearance and often their names. Throughout the book there are reflections on Hitler and Mussolini and snippets of the history of the Germans taking over the country.

Paranoia. It’s an inept bureaucracy, so it might take a couple of years, but at some point you know you will lose your job or get thrown out of college. But the bureaucracy is also inept enough to let you get a new job or to reenroll – for a while anyway. The professor is paranoid, constantly looking in shop windows, using the reflection to see if he’s being followed. He walks out of his way and doubles back to throw people off his track. He changes buses and trains for no reason.

More suspicion: People don’t answer their doorbells or their telephones. The professor meets a woman. He knows she searches his wallet while he sleeps. He searches her apartment while she sleeps. He finds nothing suspicious. This makes him even more suspicious. At times he wonders if he should even be having the thoughts he does because technology may have advanced to the point where “they” are reading your thoughts like radio waves.

It is forbidden to talk to foreigners on the street. Talking frankly generate suspicion, so only innocuous conversation occurs. You never talk in a taxicab. Even when an earthquake happens there is no radio news because the dictatorship and the bureaucracy take days to figure out what they should tell people.

Shortages and lines. The shortage of coffee and other staples is constant. Many stores are closed for “stock taking” – maybe for weeks. Every store that happens to be open has a line. People give directions by saying “go to where the line starts for such and such a store.” You join a line just for the heck of it, not even knowing what’s in stock. The lines are self-policing; a semi-riot starts when a clerk attempts to give a friend of hers more than the allowed ration of potatoes. Trains don’t come. You wait while three buses crammed full of people pass you by. Two hours later a parade of empty buses streams by. A woman tutors foreign college students for free because the gifts they give her – liquor, American cigarettes, coffee -- are more valuable than cash. The main character always carries matches with him even though he doesn’t smoke because you never know when you need them for power outages, missing light bulbs and dark corridors.

The general public is always asking people who have been to other countries if people are happy there. Can they possibly be as miserable as us? “They” is in constant use. Lovers use the refrain “they can’t take this away from us.” Boredom, gloom and suspicion prevail. Patients in the clinic are obsessed with getting their medical codes changed in the byzantine health care system because a re-categorization might increase their medical benefits or retirement disability benefits. People accept the principle of guilt by association. If your uncle gets in trouble with the authorities, you will too; after all he’s YOUR uncle. This is not considered an injustice.

Frightening stuff.

Helpful

Matko Vladanovic

Capturing the zeitgeist of a Communist Romania

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2012

There used to be a country called Romania. Oh, it still exists today though it's somewhat different than it was twenty, thirty or more years ago. Romania of today has one of the more interesting filmmaking movement, is a decent country which struggles with her past (like many of countries do on a daily basis), and - in general - is a rather fine place to live in. Not much different than rest of the (Eastern) Europe. Twenty, thirty or more years ago it was a different place. Different world. Different tragedy. "The Black Envelope" is a story from that world, world which many of us never really experienced (and never quite believed in tales of horror our parents used to tell).

Norman Manea left his country twice. Though `left' might be a poor choice of word here. First time, he "left" as a deportee when pro-Nazi regime of Ion Antonescu moved many east-Romanian Jews and Romas into a concentration camp in Ukraine. He survived the experience, returned home with surviving members of his family, entered high-school, finished college and lived his life happily ever after. Except for this latter part. Manea started writing (what a silly thing to do) sometime in '69, in a magazine that soon got banned by the Authorities. He wrote this and that, always on the lookout, until he finally made a bad choice (relatively speaking of course) and wrote "The black envelope" which didn't sit well with the Forces that Be. One didn't mess with these Forces if one wanted to be around when his grandkids grow up. It was 1986. and Manea had to leave the country. It was one of those "or else" situations and luckily, doors were open to him. He received scholarship from a West-German institution, from where he left to US taking on the mantle of a dissident writer, never to return, never to put this mantle down. He wrote many a book in upcoming years but "The Black Envelope" somehow remained his cornerstone.

What's it all about? Well...it's really difficult to tell in a few words. It's not about that is important, rather - it's how it's told that really does the trick. "The Black Envelope" is not about an exact experience (sure, there is a story here - one in which former professor made hotel clerk is looking for answers about what happened to his father 40 years ago - but main focus of this novel lies elsewhere) it's more about re-living one's past and one's present by the means of words. "The Black Envelope" summarizes 40 years of Romanian past and is doing just that using the language of fear; allegoric, evasive language which constituted Romanian identities back then (using a different language, one that we're accustomed to today, meant prosecution, disappearance and death). This may prove difficult for a general reader because it relies heavily upon being able to move around a thick layer of allusions, satirical jabs, provocations and murky notions of day-to-day events in Communist Romania. If you read this today, without any experience whatsoever of life under totalitarian regimes, you'll definitely wonder what was all the fuss about back then. Why this was even banned. There is an answer in the book though you'll have to work for it. If you read this book careful enough you should be able to spot the predominant topics of fear and desperation which wasn't just a figment of one person's imagination or paranoia - it was a state affair; a zeitgeist. In "The Black Envelope" Manea managed to capture four decades of dread and anxiety present in one country and its inhabitants. He did so in a unique voice which, quite deservedly, placed him in a pantheon of contemporary writers of note. You should hear what he has to say.

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