The Penultimate Day: Thursday, May I, 1997īut it is nothing serious, and in an instant everything is back in place - the photo shop where he is having the photo for his new ID processed the neighborhood diner the local Starbucks and, of course, a McDonald’s, its entrance graced by a pair of panhandlers.The Longest Day: Wednesday, April 30, 1997.Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, this is the work of a writer with an acute understanding of the vast human potential for both evil and kindness, obedience and integrity. Both a harrowing memoir and an ambitious epic project, The Hooligan’s Return achieves a subtle internal harmony as anxiety evolves into a delicate irony and a burlesque fantasy.
Manea speaks of the bloodiest time of the twentieth century and of the emergence afterward of a global, competitive, and sometimes cynical modern society. Autobiographical events merge with historic elements, always connecting the individual with the collective destiny. But while Norman Manea’s book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative work, traversing time and place, life and literature, dream and reality, past and present.
At the center of The Hooligan’s Return is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America.