Black Envelope (Norman Manea)

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

"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) "A vortex of imponderables: an elusive mystery story, a penetrating X-ray of Romania in the 1980s, a Kafkaesque parable of a world turned upside down in our nightmarish century. It's an enigmatic and deeply compelling novel." (Edward Hirsch)"