Норман Маня: The Black Envelope

A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, an eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high school teacher on «moral grounds,» is investigating his father s death forty years after the fact, and is drawn into a web of suspicion and black humor.

«Reading The Black Envelope, one might think of the poisonous black milk of Celan s Death Fugue or the claustrophobic air of mounting terror in Mr. Appelfeld s Badenheim 1939 … Mr. Manea offers striking images and insights into the recent experience of Eastern Europe.» — New York Times Book Review