The black envelope
By: Norman Manea ; translated from the Romanian by Patrick Camiller.
Contributors: Camiller, Patrick.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
Published: 1995
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 329
Subjects: Bucharest (Romania) -- Fiction.
Description: A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, a defiant and eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high-school teacher on "moral grounds," is attempting to clear up the mystery of his father's death forty years after the fact.

He is gradually and irresistibly drawn into a web of suspicion in which images of an underground world linger obsessively: the organization of deaf-mutes whose nightmarish presence recalls the Single Party itself; the polite and timid informer, with his modest, homely reports; the black dog who has the same name as, and seems to be a metamorphosis of, the man pursued by Tolea - an elusive photographer who has left an astonishing photo archive of Communist society.

Shot through with black humor and poetry, The Black Envelope is a thoroughly modern exploration of love and guilt, vulnerability and death, estrangement, hope, and human solidarity.