Norman Manea's 'Le retour du hooligan. Une vie' Published by Seuil

Norman Manea's autobiographical work 'Le retour du hooligan. Une vie' has been published by Éditions du Seuil in the collection 'Fiction & Cie'. The book, which Manea describes as his most difficult to write, addresses themes of the Holocaust, communist totalitarianism, and exile. Born in 1936 in Suceava, Bukovina, Romania, Manea recounts his family's deportation to a Ukrainian concentration camp in 1941, where he lost his grandparents, and his liberation in 1945. He later experienced Soviet-style communist terror, describing a pivotal moment in 1952 when he witnessed an expulsion at a Union of Working Youth meeting that sparked his critical distance from the regime. Manea's father, once a rising figure in socialist commerce, was also victimized by a setup. The book explores the concept of distance and doubling as survival strategies. Manea left Romania in 1986 after the Chernobyl disaster, lived in Germany for a year, and then settled in the United States. Despite his literary recognition, he remains controversial in Romania, accused of being a 'traitor, dwarf of Jerusalem, half-man' and criticized for denouncing Romanian fascism, including the roles of intellectuals like Ionesco, Cioran, and Eliade. The title references Mihail Sebastian's 'How I Became a Hooligan', a response to Eliade's novel 'The Hooligans'. Manea's work also critiques victimization culture, advocating for silence, exile, and cunning in the tradition of James Joyce.