The Lair (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) - Tapa dura

Longlisted by Three Percent for their 2013 Best Translated Book in Fiction. -- Translation Book Award * Three Percent * "Great imaginative energy . . . an elaborate, intricate, delicate narrative structure, balanced just so . . . The Lair shows us life as a richly incomplete and unresolved experience."-Reginald Gibbons, TriQuarterly -- Reginald Gibbons * TriQuaterly * "Compelling"-Tess Lewis, Arts Fuse -- Tess Lewis * Arts Fuse * A New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" * New York Times *

Norman Manea, Romania's most famous contemporary author, twice has survived the grip of totalitarian regimes. No stranger to exile, he mines its complexities and disorientations in this extraordinarily compelling novel, The Lair. Exile in the motherland and away from it is the shared plight of his protagonists. Nowhere at home, they move through their lives in a continuous, ever-elusive quest for national and individual identity. Manea's characters seek a place and a voice in America, only to discover that the shackles of their native totalitarian and nationalist ideologies are impossible to break. Manea's themes and narrative approach are intricate: his style fluctuates in correspondence with the instability of his characters' lives, his story is encased within an elaborate network of allusions and paradoxes. Yet in the midst of the novel's overriding disorientation, the author establishes intersections and uncovers the universal. Through the predicaments of his perpetual outsiders, he offers a poignant assessment of the conflicts of the individual in the age of globalization. He writes with unmatched intensity and a unique sensitivity to the human tragicomedy.