Nothing is incompatible in Romania.
In 1986, at the age of 50 and three years before the fall of communism in Romania, Norman Manea decided to emigrate abroad, first to Germany, later reaching the final destination - The Paradise, The Other World, The United States. He was to come back one decade later, in 1997.
The return visit, awaited with doubts and apprehension, awakens memories from his previous life. Through a non-linear chronology and convoluted narrative, he slowly reconstructs the image of his family and friends, while recollecting the experiences that shaped him: Holocaust, Communism, Exile and, above all, his Jewish origin. It is a pretext to muse on subjects such as language, identity, history, belonging, formation, ambiguity and adaptation.
The Hooligan's Return reads like a stream of consciousness, in which memories and thoughts jump back an forth in time, making a tangled ball of yarn where it is difficult to discern the beginning or the end. It is a book for the patient reader, as many things are suggested or implied, without completely explaining everything. It is not a book to skim through, but one which requires the undivided attention of its reader. The convoluted language, intermingled narrative and the abundance of historical and literary details will only appeal to a restricted audience.
Norman Manea's erudition shows on every page. He has always been surrounded by books and his memoir wouldn't have been complete without references and quotes from many writers that shaped him, such as Proust or Kafka, Celan or Mihail Sebastian, Primo Levi or Freud.
Norman Manea's language
What if I am actually living in a language, not in a country? But language is, ultimately, a mere conceited emblem of failure.
I admit I had difficulties with the language in the beginning - the writing seems pretentious and pointlessly difficult, which prompts many readers to accuse Manea of trying too hard to impress. I was tempted to file him under the same category but, while trying to decipher the structure and meaning of his phrases, an alternate explanation started to form in the back of my mind. It may not be the real explanation but it worked for me, preventing me from abandoning the book midway.
I see Manea's convoluted writing as a reaction to the flat, simplified wooden tongue of the communist period. Under such uniformity of expression, his own resistance seems to have flourished all the more, resulting in a complicated inner language. He basks in this language, he plays with words, he attributes meanings and associations, he denies the simple, the mundane. The result is not necessarily a tactile explosion of words; I have perceived it more as an erudite, academic, conscious exercise.
While he perceives the English language not as a property, but as a rental, Romanian language is Norman Manea' country, the ultimate, essential refuge. He lives in the language like inside a snail's shell, carrying it around wherever he goes. To give up one's native language would be equal to admitting the status of an emigrant; one's only ties would be severed.
After moving to France, [author:Emil Cioran|68189] denied his birth country, but he couldn't fool his origins in the face of illness: Alzheimer brought the Romanian words back on his lips, despite his wish to forget he ever knew the language. Language remains the wound.
The notion of hooligan
There is only one fertile debut in the world - hooliganism. - Mircea Eliade
In his memoir, Norman Manea uses the term not in the literal sense, but in view of its literary meaning attributed by writers such as [author:Mircea Eliade|14521] (hooliganism as rebellion, cult of death, death as a common experience) and [author:Mihail Sebastian|852840] (hooligan as a dissident, an outcast).
Manea sees the hooligan as an uprooted, undefined, non-aligned human being - even an exiled. He identifies with Mihail Sebastian's hooligan: the latter's fellow Jews considered him an enemy, while his Christian friends, members of the Iron Guard, saw him as a Jew, an outcast. He was neither here, nor there.
But what was his identity then? What is a Jew without religion or knowledge of the sacred language, without political orientation or chauvinist inclinations? Does surviving the Holocaust, the Communism, the Exile legitimate the Jew identity? Do traumas and initiations allow a person to consider oneself a Jew?
How can Jews integrate if neither the assimilation, nor conversion could ever grant them the affiliation to a nation? Their fate, at least for the Romanian Jews, is to remain hooligans.
A writer under communism
How can one be a writer without being free?
Norman Manea remained so long under communism because he believed a writer cannot manifest without the reality of one's country. Our place is here. We are writers, we have no choice, considered one of his friends. Manea admitted he was blinded, too, by the vainglory of misery. Death was present everywhere, but choosing the exile meant the loss of an important part of oneself; it could have meant the suicide of the writer, as well.
But, in order to write, one has to be alive. The exile offered a partial, temporary salvation - it was salvation not from the metaphorical death, but the real, irreparable death. And, realizing that he can carry his country with him - through his native language, Manea took the route of escape. He chose to be the undefined, the uprooted, the outcast. He embraced his role as a hooligan.
In The Hooligan's Return, Manea assumes the language of ambiguity, the common thread that has permeated his whole life, in various stages of his initiation: the internment camps, the communism and, later, the exile. He becomes obsessed with duality, with the presence of masks. But is confusion the ultimate possession of the exiled?
"We know when we've come on a work of literature that alters, for the rest of our lives, how we see, how we understand even that which we may have believed we understood before. Primo Levi's The Drowned and Saved. The Death of Ivan Illyich. Chaim Grade's My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner. Ward Number Six. And now The Hooligan's Return. I am profoundly grateful for this living, flesh-and-blood, yet unearthly memoir." -Cynthia Ozick
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005
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