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October, Eight O'Clock Stories
A collection of short stories stemming from the Romanian author's detention in a Nazi concentration camp as a child evokes a sense of the horror and absurdity of war and Romanian politics.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
3 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
About the author
Norman Manea
66 books76 followersNorman Manea is a Jewish Romanian writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist state, and exile. He lives in the United States, where he is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and writer in residence at Bard College.
He left Romania in 1986 with a DAAD-Berlin Grant and in 1988 went to the US with a Fulbright Scholarship at the Catholic University in Washington DC.
Manea's most acclaimed book, The Hooligan’s Return (2003), is an original novelistic memoir, encompassing a period of almost 80 years, from the pre-war period, through the Second World War, the communist and post-communist years to the present.
Manea has been known and praised as an international important writer since early 1990s, and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has received more than 20 awards and honors.
Born in Suceava (Bukovina, Romania), Manea was deported as a child, in 1941, by the Romanian fascist authorities, allied with Nazi Germany, to the concentration camp of Transnistria in the Ukraine with his family and the entire Jewish population of the region. He returned to Romania in 1945 with the surviving members of his family and graduated with high honors from the high school in his home town, Suceava. He studied engineering at the Construction Institute in Bucharest and graduated with master’s degree in hydro-technique in 1959, working afterwards in planning, fieldwork and research. He has devoted himself to writing since 1974.
Manea’s literary debut took place in Povestea Vorbii (The Tale of Word, 1966), an avant-garde and influential magazine that appeared in the early years of cultural liberalization in communist Romania and was suppressed after six issues. Until he was forced into exile (1986) he published ten volumes of short fiction essays and novels. His work was an irritant to the authorities because of the implied and overt social-political criticism and he faced a lot of trouble with the censors and the official press. At the same time that sustained efforts were made by the cultural authorities to suppress his work, it had the support and praise of the country’s most important literary critics.
After the collapse of the Ceaușescu dictatorship, several of his books started to be published in Romania. The publication in a Romanian translation of his essay Happy Guilt, which first appeared in The New Republic, led to a nationalist outcry in Romania, which he in turn has analysed in depth in his essay Blasphemy and Carnival. Echoes of this scandal can still be found in some articles of the current Romanian cultural press.
Meantime, in the United States and in European countries, Manea’s writing was received with great acclaim. Over the past two decades he has been proposed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature by literary and academic personalities and institutions in the United States, Sweden, Romania, Italy and France. Important contemporary writers expressed admiration of the author’s literary work and his moral stand before and after the collapse of communism: the Nobel laureates Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Octavio Paz, Orhan Pamuk, as well as Philip Roth, Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi, E. M. Cioran, Antonio Munoz Molina, Cynthia Ozick, Louis Begley and others.
He left Romania in 1986 with a DAAD-Berlin Grant and in 1988 went to the US with a Fulbright Scholarship at the Catholic University in Washington DC.
Manea's most acclaimed book, The Hooligan’s Return (2003), is an original novelistic memoir, encompassing a period of almost 80 years, from the pre-war period, through the Second World War, the communist and post-communist years to the present.
Manea has been known and praised as an international important writer since early 1990s, and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has received more than 20 awards and honors.
Born in Suceava (Bukovina, Romania), Manea was deported as a child, in 1941, by the Romanian fascist authorities, allied with Nazi Germany, to the concentration camp of Transnistria in the Ukraine with his family and the entire Jewish population of the region. He returned to Romania in 1945 with the surviving members of his family and graduated with high honors from the high school in his home town, Suceava. He studied engineering at the Construction Institute in Bucharest and graduated with master’s degree in hydro-technique in 1959, working afterwards in planning, fieldwork and research. He has devoted himself to writing since 1974.
Manea’s literary debut took place in Povestea Vorbii (The Tale of Word, 1966), an avant-garde and influential magazine that appeared in the early years of cultural liberalization in communist Romania and was suppressed after six issues. Until he was forced into exile (1986) he published ten volumes of short fiction essays and novels. His work was an irritant to the authorities because of the implied and overt social-political criticism and he faced a lot of trouble with the censors and the official press. At the same time that sustained efforts were made by the cultural authorities to suppress his work, it had the support and praise of the country’s most important literary critics.
After the collapse of the Ceaușescu dictatorship, several of his books started to be published in Romania. The publication in a Romanian translation of his essay Happy Guilt, which first appeared in The New Republic, led to a nationalist outcry in Romania, which he in turn has analysed in depth in his essay Blasphemy and Carnival. Echoes of this scandal can still be found in some articles of the current Romanian cultural press.
Meantime, in the United States and in European countries, Manea’s writing was received with great acclaim. Over the past two decades he has been proposed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature by literary and academic personalities and institutions in the United States, Sweden, Romania, Italy and France. Important contemporary writers expressed admiration of the author’s literary work and his moral stand before and after the collapse of communism: the Nobel laureates Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Octavio Paz, Orhan Pamuk, as well as Philip Roth, Claudio Magris, Antonio Tabucchi, E. M. Cioran, Antonio Munoz Molina, Cynthia Ozick, Louis Begley and others.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 23, 2017
În limba română - http://bombitaluivladmusatescu.blogsp...
In English - http://bombitaluivladmusatescuenglish...
In English - http://bombitaluivladmusatescuenglish...
September 13, 2019
bad, bad, bad, beyond bad.
January 6, 2013
Beautiful language, very adept at conveying complex emotions about a horrifying experience.
June 15, 2025
Kein unpassender Titel, für eine Erzählsammlung die in trockenem biographischen Stil eine Realität widerspiegelt, die vergangen und seltsam emotionslos erscheint. Die Sprachbilder wirken sepiafarben, die Sprache klingt weit in die Zukunft tragend, aber auf eine faszinierend entrückte Weise phrasenhaft. Ich schwanke zwischen der Erklärung als Fortschreibung der eigenen Deportation nach Transnistrien als Kind und dem Weg in eine innere Distanz im Nationalkommunismus - der mit diesem Buch dem Exil wich und in eine träumende Vergangenheit fiel. Las sich jedenfalls so, dass ich mehr von ihm lesen werde.
Besorgt, aber rücksichtsvoll erkundigte sich der Instrukteur nach seinem Zustand. Und bot ihm so von neuem Gelegenheit zur Ehrlichkeit. Sein Helfer zögerte kurz, dann gestand er: 'Ich kann meinen Zimmergenossen nicht mehr in die Augen sehen, seit ich ihre Briefe kenne.' (107)
Und es werden nur noch trübe, tintige Strudel sein, wenige Stunden vor Anbruch eines heiteren und bescheidenen Tages, der uns erneut ans verwackelte, unleserliche Zeilennetz eines zweideutigen Paragraphen anschließen wird, Romanzenklänge im Kasernenhofton; und wir werden, namenlos und solidarisch, unsere immer wieder verratenen, hingehaltene Hoffnung dazu beisteuern, diesen armseligen, vergessenen persönlichen Beitrag zu leisten. (300)
Besorgt, aber rücksichtsvoll erkundigte sich der Instrukteur nach seinem Zustand. Und bot ihm so von neuem Gelegenheit zur Ehrlichkeit. Sein Helfer zögerte kurz, dann gestand er: 'Ich kann meinen Zimmergenossen nicht mehr in die Augen sehen, seit ich ihre Briefe kenne.' (107)
Und es werden nur noch trübe, tintige Strudel sein, wenige Stunden vor Anbruch eines heiteren und bescheidenen Tages, der uns erneut ans verwackelte, unleserliche Zeilennetz eines zweideutigen Paragraphen anschließen wird, Romanzenklänge im Kasernenhofton; und wir werden, namenlos und solidarisch, unsere immer wieder verratenen, hingehaltene Hoffnung dazu beisteuern, diesen armseligen, vergessenen persönlichen Beitrag zu leisten. (300)
October 7, 2017
"Forse, come si dice, le anime di coloro che abbiamo perduto vanno davvero a rinchiudersi nelle cose inanimate. Assenti, finché non avvertono la nostra vicinanza e ci chiamano per farsi riconoscere, per farsi liberare dalla morte. Forse, davvero, il tempo non può essere ritrovato con un ordine dato alla memoria, ma rivive solo attraverso la sensazione strana, spontanea, che proviamo ritrovando l’odore, il gusto, il sapore di un qualsiasi accessorio inerte del passato." (Il tè di Proust, p. 40)
October 15, 2023
It is quite hard to put the genius of it into words. Sure, a masterpiece - although not of the anyway all-too-suspicious labelling to Holocaust literature; but it rather is a masterpiece of the 20th century Central-Eastern European existential experience.
Who's the I in this book? Who's the narrator? The palpable abyss (which is also: a connection) makes the story-telling absolutely unique, and strings all the novellas onto one overarching thread - to my knowledge, an absolutely singular literary achievement.
Who's the I in this book? Who's the narrator? The palpable abyss (which is also: a connection) makes the story-telling absolutely unique, and strings all the novellas onto one overarching thread - to my knowledge, an absolutely singular literary achievement.
February 3, 2022
Bu kitap beni çok boğdu. Kazak ve Ölüm öyküleri çok güzel, bu öykülerden çok etkilendim. Ama diğer öykülerin anlatımı aşırı kapalı, atmosferi çok puslu. Bazı yerlerde aniden anlatıcı değişiyor, bir paragrafın hatta bir cümlenin ortasında. Teknik olarak bu bana ilginç geldi. Kitabı yarım bırakmamak için çok mücadele ettim ama zorlanarak bitirdiğimde de bana kattığı çok az şey oldu.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews