With his talent and creativity, Manea belongs to the great.

Orhan Pamuk
Norman Manea

Norman Manea

Norman Manea is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and writer-in-residence at Bard College. As a child, Manea was deported to Transnistria by the Romanian fascist government, and in 1986 he went into exile from Ceausescu’s dictatorship. Since arriving in the West he has received many important awards and has been the subject of a New Yorker profile, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

cover image of the book Captives

Captives

by Norman Manea

Translated by Jean Harris

Acclaimed writer Norman Manea’s Captives is a kaleidoscopic, imagistic, and stylistically innovative look into the lives of three characters: an alienated piano teacher, an engineer reflecting on his youth, and a veteran who suffers through daily life long after surviving the battles of World War II.

Divided into interrelated sections—narrated in first-, second-, and third- person voices—Captives explores the social and psychological conditions of postwar Romania: a loss of identity, a complicated sense of guilt and trauma from having survived the fascist government during World War II, and the rise of communism.

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With his talent and creativity, Manea belongs to the great.

Orhan Pamuk

A superb writer who gives an extraordinary testimony of a rich and dramatic life under one of the most grotesque and ferocious dictatorships.

Mario Vargas Llosa

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, The New York Times Book Review
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