EVA BEHRING
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camp and its perverted normality. The boy and his friends play "death" in the
way they actually see it: after the shooting, a sudden holding out, rigidity of
movement-a sort of charade for them. Fury, shame, disgust, loneliness and
fear dominate the child and engender abstruse and secret relations to persons
and things. "The Sweater" that belongs to a little girl and is hotly wished for
by the boy becomes a fetish of his fight for survival and loses its magic force
only when the boy, after a deadly illness, gains renewed strength and courage.
Searnlessly Manea joins later experiences of threats under 1950s Stalinism and
the decades of life under Ceausescu's increasingly intolerant and aggressive
rule to childhood incidents.
Most of all, the peculiar and absurd efforts of the "normal person" to
manage under the "everyday terror" of life both in Romania and in exile
became an important subject. The explicitly social engagement of Manea's
prose, and its implicit political themes, particularly provoked his Romanian
opponents in the 1980s. After the postulate of "socialist realism" of the 1950s,
the primacy of the aesthetic was accepted with difficulty and counted a decade
later as a great accomplishment by courageous writers and critics. During the
last decade of Ceausescu's regime, the preeminence of aesthetic values was
even officially blessed and became, paradoxically, the normative principle.
Nevertheless, all troublesome conunents on explosive questions of Romanian
society were shoved aside and stigmatized as unworthy of literature.
This argument was to silence Manea as well. His works, however, had too
much positive resonance among established critics to fall into that ambiguous
category. The experts' testimony effectively showed that Manea's stories with
their social-political meaning were still conforming to the requirements of the
highest aesthetic norrns. From exegeses
of
his work one could read, with just
a bit of knowledge of his background, that he was framing in a linguistically
masterful way the most sensitive social-political conditions for the broader sen–
sitive human questions. His ingenious use of "collage" techniques,
simultaneity of events and the abrupt "direction of the camera" in the depic–
tion of scenes, is connected by a distinctive pressure of high emotionality, a
breathless rhythm of a very personal, original style. Helplessly, the reader is
propelled ahead through worlds of a very specific entwining of inner and outer
reality. The inner reality, whose discourse moves at breakneck speed from the
"I" to the "you" or to the third person, brings forth different times and differ–
ent ways of appropriating the world. Discreetly interwoven, imaginary figures
often disclose the author's ironic judgements, which, at times, can reach into
the parodic and yet, in whatever form, unerring recognitions of the human
condition. The outer "spectacle;' "scenery," "dramaturgy" or even "fairy
tale;' becomes in the protagonist's view the "actor and viewer all in one" and,
eventually, the deformed lines of a grotesque reality. The references and allu–
sions to the "I" character as Manea's differentiated persona in his stories and
