The Black Envelope

A melancholy tale of searching—for documents, for truth, for coffee—from the Romanian master

 

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. Norman Manea’s enigmatic and artful novel—set against the backdrop of life under the repressive Ceausescu regime—depicts the chaos and deprivation of Tolea’s existence, and his tenuous grip on reality.