wmhenrymorris's review
Norman Manea's essays on his experiences as a fiction writer under the Ceaucescu dictatorship come with a heavy dose of inside baseball, but while that material, that detailed context, is necessary and interesting, it also doesn't need to be 100% grokked--just absorbed enough for the more universal and personal sentences and paragraphs to do their work. In short: what Manea experienced is both chilling and absurd, and there are lessons to be learned about how literature both pushes against and is warped by totalitarian conditions.
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