Compulsory Happiness
Norman Manea. Northwestern University Press, $17 (259pp) ISBN 978-0-8101-1190-5
Four absurdist novellas by the Romanian novelist tell of life under a totalitarian regime. (Nov.)
Details
Reviewed on: 10/03/1994
Genre: Fiction
- Amazon
- Apple Books
- Barnes & Noble
- Bookshop
- IndieBound
- Share
- Tweet
- Copy Link
More By and About this Authorchevron_right
- THE HOOLIGAN'S RETURN: A MemoirNorman ManeaManea's life is simple synoptically, though his memoir is not. During WWII, when Manea is five, his Jewish family is deported to a concentration camp; he survives the "Initiation of Continue reading »
- On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist: EssaysNorman ManeaManea, who emigrated to the West in 1986, portrays life under Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship in Romania as a ``sinister carnival,'' a nightmarish Fellini movie. The country, governed by the Continue reading »
- October Eight O'Clock: StoriesNorman ManeaSurvivor of a Nazi concentration camp in the Ukraine, Romanian-born Manea, now a literature professor at Bard College in upstate New York, writes with lyrical precision about the unspeakable traumas Continue reading »
- Compulsory HappinessNorman ManeaThis taut, sophisticated collection of four novellas, set in the author's native Romania, conjures up a land of disturbing contrasts in which political and personal dramas unfold against the backdrop Continue reading »
- The Black EnvelopeNorman ManeaRomanian novelist Manea's fifth book (after Compulsory Happiness) is a dark, enigmatic tale in which a man's investigation of his father's death, 40 years before, is set against the repressions and Continue reading »
- The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and LanguageNorman ManeaThis new collection from MacArthur Fellow Manea (The Black Envelope) brings together translations of essays written between 1989 and 2011. The titular "impossibility" is exile, and Manea considers Continue reading »
- CaptivesNorman ManeaIn this bold novel, Manea (The Hooligan's Return) explores a population "imprisoned by the ravaged waters of impossible forgetting" in the aftermath of World War II, trying to make sense of what it Continue reading »
- THIS BLINDING ABSENCE OF LIGHTTahar Ben JellounBased on an incident involving starvation and torture in Morocco, Prix Goncourt–winner Jelloun's latest novel is a disturbing, grisly account of how a prisoner survived a 20-year Continue reading »
- MY FORBIDDEN FACE: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's StoryLatifaReaders who want to know what life was really like when the Taliban ruled Kabul should turn off CNN and read this book. Latifa (who writes under a pseudonym) was a 16-year-old aspiring journalist Continue reading »
- THE ABSOLUTE PERFECTION OF CRIMETanguy VielViel's English-language debut, a crime novel about a band of aging crooks who reunite to rob a casino in a French coastal town, is a small but polished gem that sparkles from start to finish. Continue reading »
- HAPPY DAYSLaurent Graff"I wanted to let myself drift gently on the surface of life, floating on my back until I wound up flat on my back six feet under." So reveals the narrator of this curious, rather cold Continue reading »
- THE PROPHECY OF THE STONESFlavia BujorWritten when the Romanian-born Bujor was 13 (now 15, she lives in France), this fantasy merits interest chiefly because of its author's tender age. In an old-fashioned realm, three 14-year-old Continue reading »
- MACHETE SEASON: The Killers in Rwanda SpeakJean HatzfeldThis book features the testimony of 10 friends from the same village who spent day after day together, fulfilling orders to kill any Tutsi within their territory during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Continue reading »
- RavelJean EchenozPrix Goncourt–winner Echenoz's fifth novel to be translated into English covers the last 10 years in the life of French composer Maurice Ravel, who in 1927 was 52 years old and at the Continue reading »
- Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda SpeakJean HatzfeldFrench journalist and war correspondent Hatzfeld offers brief, pithy accounts of 14 survivors of the three-day Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which 10,000 Tutsis seeking refuge in churches were Continue reading »
- Wartime Writings, 1943?1949Marguerite DurasThis engrossing volume of newly published material from French novelist and memoirist Duras's wartime notebooks contains writing as roiled and violent as the years that produced it. Continue reading »
- Children of HeroesLyonel TrouillotIn this sad tale from Haitian novelist Trouillot (Street of Lost Footsteps ), siblings Colin and Mariéla, slum children of Port-au-Prince, live in fear of Continue reading »
- The Antelope?s Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the GenocideJean HatzfeldThe horrors of communal violence give way to quieter torments in this harrowing collection of oral histories. Hatzfeld revisits Tutsi survivors and confessed Hutu killers he interviewed in Continue reading »
- Beyond SuspicionTanguy VielWhile Viel's second contemporary crime novel (after 2003's The Absolute Perfection of Crime ) offers a familiar plot, even jaded mystery readers should Continue reading »
- Leaving TangierTahar Ben JellounAs several expatriate Moroccans learn in Jelloun's latest, it doesn't matter how difficult life may be in the home country, a whole new set of difficulties waits in the promised land. Continue reading »
- I Am Nujood, Age 10 and DivorcedNujood AliHeadlines traveled around the globe in the spring of 2008 when the barely 10-year-old Nujood Ali “found the courage to knock on the [Yemen] courtroom door”; she had come seeking a Continue reading »
- My Life as a Russian Novel: A MemoirEmmanuel CarrereIn this compelling, intensely interior-driven narrative, French author Carr�re (The Adversary) uses as a point of departure the return of a Hungarian mental patient imprisoned in a Russian hospital Continue reading »
- A Palace in the Old VillageTahar Ben JellounConsisting of a subtle, well-paced first section and a more elaborate second that is too rushed, Ben Jelloun's latest novel feels like two halves of a story that never quite come together. Mohammed Continue reading »
- Naming the JungleAntoine VolodineThe American debut of a French writer is an intense, hallucinatory novel of a man's daring psychological ruse to protect himself from political brutality. Fabian Golpiez, a Jucapira Indian in a Continue reading »
- Travelers TreeBruno BontempelliFrench writer Bontempelli's clever and gripping 18th-century tale-his first novel to be translated into English-begins with a deceptively simple premise: the crewmen of the French exploring vessel Continue reading »
- What the Night Tells the DayHector BianciottiLooking back across large separations in time, language, culture and identity, Bianciotti, literary correspondent for Le Monde, mines the experiences of his youth in Peron-era Argentina for insights Continue reading »
- What the Night Tells the DayHector BianciottiBianciotti, an Argentine-born writer who writes in French, presents a novelized autobiography chronicling coming to terms with his homosexuality. Continue reading »
- School DaysPatrick ChamoiseauIn this rhythmic narrative set in Fort de France, Martinique, the author of the 1992 Prix Goncourt-winning Texaco (reviewed PW 12/09/96) recalls his days spent at colonial school. Amidst snatches of Continue reading »
- Shadows of a Childhood: A Novel of War and FriendshipElisabeth Gille, Elizabeth GilleWith the trial of 87-year-old Maurice Papon, an alleged Vichy collaborator, in the news, the posthumous publication of this novel about a Jewish girl hidden in a Bordeaux convent during WWII comes at Continue reading »
- Pig TalesMarie Darrieussecq""I suspect that any publisher who agrees to take on this manuscript will be heading for trouble,"" admits the unnamed female narrator of this brash first novel, which is set in France in the Continue reading »
- UndercurrentsMarie DarrieussecqFrom the epigraph (taken from a Bj rk song) to the final pages, French sensation Marie Darrieussecq's (Pig Tales) Undercurrents (trans. by Linda Coverdale) is tinged with mystery and quiet menace. Continue reading »
- The Children of SeguMaryse CondeThis sequel to Segu concerns the 19th-century tribal wars, Islamic conquest and French occupation of the African kingdom, focusing on characters with kinship bonds to the Traore family. ``Male Continue reading »
- Literature or LifeJorge SemprunThirty years after The Long Voyage, his haunting autobiographical novel about his deportation to Buchenwald at the age of 20, Semprun has written another autobiographical work. This one explores his Continue reading »
- School DaysPatrick ChamoiseauIn this rhythmic narrative set in Fort de France, Martinique, the author of the 1992 Prix Goncourt-winning Texaco (reviewed PW 12/09/96) recalls his days spent at colonial school. Amidst snatches of Continue reading »
- Chronicle of the Seven SorrowsPatrick ChamoiseauPublished in France in 1986 and appearing in the U.S. for the first time in Coverdale's excellent translation, Chamoiseau's first novel, written before Texaco, is an astonishingly assured piece of Continue reading »
- Speak You Also: A Survivor's ReckoningPaul SteinbergIn If This Is a Man, Primo Levi describes Henri, a fellow inmate at Auschwitz, as a strategist of survival: flattering, stealing and endlessly manipulating the kapos and other prisoners for his own Continue reading »
- Grain of the VoiceRoland BarthesCollected here are many previously published interviews with Barthes, which give him a forum for discussing his work. He also comments on a wide variety of issues, arguing, for example, that de Sade Continue reading »
- The Children of SeguMaryse CondeSequel to Guadeloupan author Conde's highly praised Segu , this historical novel trudges through the 19th-century tribal wars, Islamic conquest and French occupation of the African kingdom of Segu, Continue reading »
- To the Friend Who Did Not Save My LifeHerve Guibert, Guibert``I had AIDS for three months,'' opens this moving French bestseller, which reads like a personal memoir. Delivered with wit, verve and valor by a seasoned author and former Le Monde journalist, the Continue reading »
- Le Petit GarconPhilippe LabroIn One Summer Out West , Labro's hero came of age in a Colorado work camp, circa 1955. In The Foreign Student , the protagonist underwent the rite in an all-male Virginia college of the same era. The Continue reading »
- A Very Long EngagementSebastien JaprisotIn 1917, a crippled young French woman searches for her fiance who was left to die on the front lines of WWI. Continue reading »
- Compulsory HappinessNorman ManeaThis taut, sophisticated collection of four novellas, set in the author's native Romania, conjures up a land of disturbing contrasts in which political and personal dramas unfold against the backdrop Continue reading »
- A Very Long EngagementSebastien JaprisotAfter a court martial in January 1917, five Frenchmen convicted of self-mutilation (in order to avoid combat in WW I) are dragged along the network of zigzagging trenches to the improbably named Continue reading »
- Creole Folktales -Op/69Patrick ChamoiseauThe 1992 winner of France's Goncourt Prize brilliantly retells 12 tales from his home island of Martinique in his first book to be published in the U.S. Included are delightfully coarse and lively Continue reading »
- Class TripEmmanuel CarrereIf Sartre had written an episode of the Twilight Zone, it might have been Carrere's much-lauded The Mustache, in which a man who shaves off his signature facial hair finds that his very identity is Continue reading »
- Dark Tunnel, White Light: My Journey to Death and BeyondPhilippe LabroThe ability of the near-death experience to transform a participant's life is by now well known. Just how life-altering the experience can be, however, is vividly and movingly chronicled in this Continue reading »
- Mamzelle DragonflyRaphael ConfiantSet in mid-century Martinique, this atmospheric novel--Confiant's first to be translated into English--unfolds against a backdrop of political unrest as the islanders debate whether to accept Continue reading »
- Vie FrancaiseJean-Paul DuBoisIn this first translation of veteran French novelist Dubois, Gallic everyman Paul Blick experiences decades of turmoil and tragedy, and conscientiously adds each mishap-whether national or Continue reading »
- LightningJean EchenozThe affecting story of a difficult and misunderstood European visionary on American shores comprises this lyrical, slender novel by Prix Goncourt%E2%80%93winner Echenoz (Running). Born during a Continue reading »
- Lives Other than My OwnEmmanuel Carrere, Emmanuel CarrreCarr%C3%A8re (The Adversary) somewhat smugly asserts himself, in this autobiographical novel, as a puppeteer of grand emotions, evoking with a merciless hand incredible sadness, hope, and even Continue reading »
- VivianeJulia DeckOn the surface, Viviane �lisabeth Fauville appears unassuming: she is 42 years old, recently separated from her husband, and on maternity leave from her PR job at a Paris concrete company. In Deck?s Continue reading »
- The Queen's CapriceJean EchenozEchenoz (Big Blondes) offers seven %E2%80%9Clittle literary objects": elegant, succinct narratives that question, mock, and undermine narrative convention. The first piece portrays English hero Continue reading »
Featured Fiction Reviews
The Storyteller’s Death
Ann Daavila Cardinal
Cardinal (Category Five) delivers a stunning, magic-infused tale of family ties and secrets. In the 1970s, eight-year-old Isla Larsen Sanchez is sent from New Jersey to Puerto Continue reading »
Before All the World
Moriel Rothman-Zecher
Rothman-Zecher (Sadness Is a White Bird) delivers a rich and engrossing narrative of two Jewish immigrants in the U.S. and a Black writer who translates their story from the Continue reading »
My Manservant and Me
Hervé Guibert
The late novelist and AIDS provocateur-activist Guibert (To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life) offers an exquisite narrative of submissive seduction, sadistic subjugation, and Continue reading »
The Magic Kingdom
Banks’s heartbreaking latest (after Foregone) delves into the history of a Shaker community in Florida through one man’s tragic story. In a metafictional frame, Banks describes Continue reading »
chevron_right
