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A review by mpho3
The Hooligan's Return: A Memoir by Norman Manea
4.0
Manea's memoir makes for very dense reading but is a fascinating account of a Jewish Romanian writer who survived his family's deportation during WWII to the concentration camps of Transnistria only to live through the Romania's Stalinist 1950s and the horrors of Nicolae Ceaușescu's totalitarian reign before eventually emigrating to the United States.
Despite the many hardships encountered in his home country, Manea's experience abroad has been one of an exile from his language. As Carla Baricz, explains in the LA Review of Books, "What makes The Hooligan’s Return such a unique and celebrated memoir is that it rejects its own form in a way that invokes the complexities of the genre. The book does not read like biography. The 'facts' act only as anchoring points to a larger theme: Manea’s relationship to his mother tongue, and the way a writer, especially one in exile, invents him/herself out of language. Indeed, the memoir is as much about the necessity and the cost of retelling personal narratives as it is about the past it evokes. The narrative structure of The Hooligan’s Return seeks various answers to this dilemma."
As such The Hooligan's Return is certainly an intellectual challenge. I am not very familiar with Romanian history and culture, but I could relate to his many questions about who we are as individuals, what makes us who we are, and to what purpose. The Hooligan's Return is a harrowing but successful experiment in creative nonfiction.
Despite the many hardships encountered in his home country, Manea's experience abroad has been one of an exile from his language. As Carla Baricz, explains in the LA Review of Books, "What makes The Hooligan’s Return such a unique and celebrated memoir is that it rejects its own form in a way that invokes the complexities of the genre. The book does not read like biography. The 'facts' act only as anchoring points to a larger theme: Manea’s relationship to his mother tongue, and the way a writer, especially one in exile, invents him/herself out of language. Indeed, the memoir is as much about the necessity and the cost of retelling personal narratives as it is about the past it evokes. The narrative structure of The Hooligan’s Return seeks various answers to this dilemma."
As such The Hooligan's Return is certainly an intellectual challenge. I am not very familiar with Romanian history and culture, but I could relate to his many questions about who we are as individuals, what makes us who we are, and to what purpose. The Hooligan's Return is a harrowing but successful experiment in creative nonfiction.