Book Description
The Hooligan’s Return is a haunting memoir, vividly re-creating Norman Manea’s harrowing childhood in Fascist Romania while providing indelible portraits of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the pre- and post-Communist eras.
Manea’s observations about his visit in 1997 are intertwined with his reflections on his return to Romania after four years in Transnistria, in the camps to which large numbers of Romanian Jews were transported in 1941. As the narrative utilizes one journey to illuminate the other, Manea’s friends and family tell their own stories, and the topic of departure and return proves to be an obsessive constant.
As the story of a writer who is anything but militant, a literary man more interested in moral and aesthetic questions than in politics, this compelling and beautifully executed memoir explores questions of identity, exile, and the conflict between life and literature, dream and reality, past and present.