Romanian exile Norman Manea’s internationally acclaimed memoir/novel, now available to English-language readers At the center of The Hooligan’s Return is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America. But while Norman Manea’s book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative work, traversing time and place, life and literature, dream and reality, past and present. Autobiographical events merge with historic elements, always connecting the individual with the collective destiny. Manea speaks of the bloodiest time of the twentieth century and of the emergence afterward of a global, competitive, and sometimes cynical modern society. Both a harrowing memoir and an ambitious epic project, The Hooligan’s Return achieves a subtle internal harmony as anxiety evolves into a delicate irony and a burlesque fantasy. Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, this is the work of a writer with an acute understanding of the vast human potential for both evil and kindness, obedience and integrity.

Survivor of the Nazi camps and Ceausescu's Romania, winner of the National Book Award, recipient of a MacArthur Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Norman Manea, an extraordinary man of letters, "gives us a taste of something beyond the scope of even our twentieth-century imagination. . . . Manea is too profound a witness to place his gift for observation in the service of another sensualist account. . . . What matters for him is the phenomenon of an entire nation's life under this simultaneously grotesque and terrifying rule." -- The New Republic

In cool, precise prose, and with an unerring sense of the absurd, the four novellas of "Compulsory Happiness" create a picture of everyday life in a grotesque police state, expressing terror and hope, fear and solidarity, the humorous triviality of the ordinary, and the painful search for an ideal. "Norman Manea's four novellas, written during the later Ceausescu years, offer a comparable contrast to other Eastern European dissident writing. Instead of the energetic irony, the ebullient absurdism, the sharp-eyed wit, we find a dreamy disconnection, a voice that shock has lowered, an air of sweetness driven mad."--Richard Eder, "Los Angeles Times" "Mr. Manea's voice is radically new, and we are blessedly awakened and alerted by the demand his fiction makes on our understanding."--Lore Segal, "New York Times Book Review"