Felicidad obligatoria

by Norman Manea

Con «El interrogatorio», donde el escritor rumano Norman Manea narra cómo un pequeño respiro que otorgan a una presa revela la inconsistencia de su verdugo, arranca Felicidad obligatoria, un volumen compuesto por cuatro relatos que transportan súbitamente al lector a las vicisitudes cotidianas en un Estado policial grotesco pero temible. «Biografía robot», el segundo relato, traza las carreras de unos camaradas en Bucarest, defensores a ultranza de la revolución. Le siguen «Una ventana a la clase trabajadora», donde una injusticia se convierte en el remoto motivo de un juicio ante la Suprema Corte, y «La gabardina», en el que se desatan las sospechas cuando, tras marcharse los invitados de una cena, queda olvidada una gabardina muy parecida a la que llevan los agentes de la policía de seguridad.

Cuatro historias que destilan esperanza y terror, miedo y solidaridad, y que, en los más variados registros del lenguaje, muestran la festiva trivialidad de la vida al tiempo que la dolorosa búsqueda de un ideal.

Genres: Romanian Literature, Short Stories, Romania, Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Norman 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.

Reviews

[Kuszma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gyöngyszem. Manea négy novellája helyzetjelentés a diktatúrából, de egyik sem úgy, ahogy azt megszoktuk. Az első tétel (A kihallgatás) egy vallatás története, de az író kifordítja a szituációt, mint egy rossz kabátot, és máris minden másképp működik, mint az átlagos naturális borzalomirodalomban. A többi elbeszélésre ez még hatványozottabban igaz – Maneát ugyanis nem az érdekli, amit a totális állam közvetlenül tesz velünk, hanem az, ami kikandikál a hétköznapok szövete alól: az egzisztenciális bizonytalanság, a frusztráció és a félelem, amit akár olyan semmiség is kiválthat, mint egy trencskó, aminek nem szabadna ott lennie, ahol épp van. Másfajta bizonytalanság ez, mint amit a plurális demokrácia kínál, ahol az érzés forrása többnyire a túl sok és túl feldolgozhatatlan információ, így – végső soron – frusztrációnk oka nem más, mint saját döntéskényszerünk és -képtelenségünk. A diktatúrákban ezzel szemben az információk száma viszonylag korlátozott, a szabályok sem észvesztően bonyolultak – a probléma abból fakad, hogy bármelyik pillanatban megváltozhatnak, mégpedig váratlanul és érthetetlenül, mert a változás oka gyakran csak annyi, hogy a Nagy Vezér egy szép nyári napon rosszul ébredt, és rájött a hoppáré. Semmi sem kiszámítható, semmivel sem lehet kalkulálni – és az ebből fakadó bizonytalanság adja ezeknek a történeteknek a kötőanyagát. Mert az autoriter állam nem csak nagy rémtetteiben félelmetes, hanem kisstílűségében is – mert ez a kisstílűség beszivárog mindenhová, és ha a vallatótiszteket el is kerüljük, ettől nem lehet megszabadulni. És Manea borges-i talentummal: finoman és intelligensen képes beszélni erről. Nagy író.

[Demelza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing. The translator has done a wonderful job. A compelling set of stories worth reading.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I expected

In what seems a handful of loosely linked...if my guess that repeating names indicate individuals or their families and relatives...stories, the pressures exerted under the then-Unnamable surname of the megalomaniac dictator and his science-trained spouse during Romania's postwar regime reveal unsurprisingly grim accounts of functionaries, spies, dissidents, and resigned, scared, and dissembling everyday people who, having survived fascism, face under communism another brutal imposition of the triumph of the will. Well, how such repression gets activated with the cowed, terrified, craven, compromised, blackmailed masses. And those who, having had to serve the regime, out of involuntary submission or fanatical conviction, must endure the dark decades for forty years after their supposed liberation from totalitarianism.

The setting's what motivated my esoteric choice. Compared to literature translated from Czech, Russian, German, Polish, or Hungarian, we in the formerly titled First World don't have a wide selection of writers we can investigate. Perhaps Manea's status comes from the prominence given his place in the New York establishment among the NYRB crowd and his Bard College professorial perch. For he's not a crowd-pleaser, but very much the kind of intellectual who'd be championed by Philip Roth or Saul Bellow in the era of the Iron Curtain. Nowadays, the audience patient and educated enough to seek out works from Manea and his comrades. Generations have passed, and trends in publishing swing away from Europe, at least in tales spun by its native tellers. Unless a teller's higher on today's intersectional chart, this genre may rapidly languish.

Finally, Manea's not the most reader-friendly chronicler of his homeland, but he's more accessible than Herta Müller. Although her Nobel Prize has elevated her renown in the West contrasted with Manea's earlier, if small scale, success as her predecessor in crafting dense, ruminating, febrile narratives. As we English-language bookworms lack options in seeking to learn about life under Soviet satellite domination, this may be another reason why Romania's relatively few voices heard beyond borders once around the Second World disproportionately tilt towards sententious, moody, and monochrome motifs? Plus, these entries were first rendered into second languages of French or German, not a good sign of spirited prose surviving midway before it's processed into English. I look forward to solid work closer to its original Romanian sources.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Global Read 176 Romania

These novellas were chilling and disturbing and did a great job of plunking the reader down right in Ceaușescu's Romania. The first one was by far my favorite and reminded me of Herta Muller. The second one played with tense and perspective so much that it was distracting. The last two were good as well. It's interesting that the novellas were translated into French and then from French to English. I'm sure that the double translation caused them to lose something along the way and I'd love for there to be another version that was translated from Romanian.

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Trenciul" mi-a adus aminte inconfortabil de copilărie. Am avut sentimentul ca retraiesc dialogurile si viata părintilor mei si a prietenilor lor din anii '80.
Extraordinar spiritul de observatie al autorului, subtilitatile dialogurilor si credibilitatea personajelor.
Generațiile mai tinere probabil nu vor intelege nimic din aluziile si echilibristica autorului printre cuvinte (cu scopul eludarii cenzurii), si poate ca e bine sa fie asa (pana cand lipsa de interes si cunoaștere a acelori vremuri vor creea conditii propice pentru instalarea altor regimuri autoritare).

Un pic prea poetic pentru gustul meu pe ici, pe colo (pasaje din "Biografia Robot" aproape m-au facut sa renunt), dar pana la urmă, am terminat cartea cu un set de emotii coplesitoare, si multa dragoste si compasiune pentru parintii mei si anii ingrozitori in care si-au trăit tinerețea.

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Diffidare di tutti? Temere qualunque cosa significhi l'ignoto? Eppure, ci vuole imprudenza... Dobbiamo aprire, di tanto in tanto, la ferita. Un contatto insalubre. Con la polvere, con la brutalità, con la semplicità aspra. Immondizia e microbi, il lamento della banalità. Anticorpi prodotti dalla contaminazione, dai microbi e dalla sporcizia. E, quindi, rigenerazione."
(Una finestra sulla classe operaia, p. 134)

[Jason McCracken]

DNF. 24%. I really enjoyed it for about 10 minutes but then it just became tiresome. Apparently it was translated from Romanian to French and then from French to English so maybe that's why the writing feels so generic.

[Claudia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interogatoriul: 5*/5
Biografia robot: 2*/5
O fereastră către clasa muncitoare: 3*/5
Trenciul: 3*/5

[Misael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me encanta la literatura de dictadores.
Pero es un género que, siento yo, nos sale mejor a los latinoamericanos.
El último cuento, La Gabardina, y el primero me parecen los mejores de la colección.
La Gabardina es un gran relato sobre la paranoia que supone vivir bajo un régimen de constante vigilancia.
El primero es una buena metáfora sobre el poder y la fragilidad de los regímenes totalitarios.

[Veronica Visoţchi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stilul de scris și formulare mi-a plăcut.
Subiectul mai puțin l-am înțeles. Astfel e 3/5

[Ava_h]

if you say you know what this is about you’re lying