About this ebook
Captives, the acclaimed writer Norman Manea's first novel, is a fascinating, kaleidoscopic, and imaginative look into postwar Romania. Divided into three sections–narrated in first-, second-, and third-person voices–Captives explores the lives of several defeated characters as they become almost too much to bear under the weight of endless humiliations: loss of identity, trauma of having survived the Second World War, and submission to the totalitarian state.
This is a moving account of a country shaken by communism and anti-Semitism and haunted by recent atrocities, from "a distinguished writer whose vision of totalitarianism is close to Kafka's cloudy menace, universal yet internalized" (Richard Eder, The New York Times).
About the author
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, has been the subject of a New Yorker profile, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
Jean Harris is a novelist, essayist, and translator living in Bucharest, Romania. She was the 2007-2008 grant recipient from the University of California, Irvine’s International Center for Writing and Translation.
