Our Every Day Lair - About the Lair, Norman Manea's New Novel

2009 was a difficult year. So hard that I tried to look for a hole in which to stay and hide, as the teacher Gora, one of Norman Manea's characters, the novel of the same name: Vizuina (Lair) [2009, Polirom, Iasi, Romania].It was a terrible year, but even I finished it well, reading this book. True, I could not find my lair... but at least I found someone who still prefers books more then people. I would like to talk now about the book, but inevitably I get to people. Because the characters in this book, a large majority, are people hidden. Real people. More or less famous. More. Eliade. Culianu. For example.America. Romania. Fragments of time and space. Memory remains and amorphous islands in the fictional ocean shipwrecked. Personal Filters. Insinuations. Too many insinuations. After all, is a novel, is not it? And the author is the world artisan he creates in that novel. Nothing can dictate what to write and what not to write. If he wants to have a heraclitean line, he can
. If he wants to have fragments in an eliadian style combined with a borgesian one, he can. But he does not want. The author is almighty. Grand Anonymous. Great Assassin.I have read, I think, a couple of books in which characters hide real people. I think that Julia Kristeva's Samurai is on top. And not because the characters, I think, but because if the talent. Norman Manea is getting close...Frankly, I am not part of those who worship the ode, nor of those who attack the individuals. In fact, not part of any people. I admit, I never won anything so far that I have not joined any group. On the contrary. But why is it always about profit? It would be nice to not be any loss, but that is another story. Now it's about a lair. This and that. The world is made up of many. Hillocks as, for example, are socialist housing blocks.Not only Gora, Professor Gora has a lair and hides in it. And Peter Gaspar, also a teacher, has one. Hiding him from other reasons, a possible death threat
. After the other teacher, here Mihnea Palade was liquidated, there is no joke with such threats. Even the master, Dima had his lair. Maybe it was the haunt of all, if we consider the great secret that he has managed to keep unknown until his death. Even after. Yes, it is true, the scandal was greater when it booms, its traces are still felt today. Even now some say that yes, some say that not, as in the famous jokes with Bul.It's good to form an opinion, isn't it? Perhaps even better, one objective. But to make career of denigrating another, as did one author, formerly supported by even one that attacked, that's not good.Norman Manea is a talented jongleur that not dropped parts, whatever how many he takes in his hands. Keep pretty good balance in this book. Do not attack, but not silent. Cannot possibly hold. Cannot do it. He is from time to time critical. Criticism is healthy. He tries. To justify. Find reasons. He struggles. Exile is a new beginning? It was a mistake of
youth, small, large, unrecognized, hidden. O.K. But participation? Can be forgiven? O.K. But he continued connection here in the new country, why his private doctor was a former comrade? Well, you are new or not?Exile maybe does not renewed you. It may cannot do so. If you were exiled before you leave your country, nothing changed. Neither Lu, the female character that appears with one or other of the characters, including the narrator himself, as a link that binds them. Exile is in you, since the moment you were born. Birth, is an exile. Earth, a lair.Where to hide? Why? You cannot run from yourself.

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