{"id":293286,"date":"2013-03-06T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-06T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/03\/06\/why-this-book-should-win-the-lair-by-norman-manea-btba-2013\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:31","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:31","slug":"why-this-book-should-win-the-lair-by-norman-manea-btba-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/03\/06\/why-this-book-should-win-the-lair-by-norman-manea-btba-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Why This Book Should Win: "The Lair" by Norman Manea [BTBA 2013]"},"content":{"rendered":"

As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA<\/span> Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the whole series by clicking here.<\/a> And if you’re interested in writing any of these, just get in touch.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

The Lair<\/em><\/a> by Norman Manea, translated from the Romanian by Oana Sanziana Marian and published by Yale University Press<\/b><\/p>\n

This piece is by translator, critic, and BTBA<\/span> judge, Tess Lewis.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Next time I kill you, I promise. The labyrinth made of a single straight line which is invisible and everlasting. Yours truly, D.<\/em> This Borgesian death threat, assembled from words cut out of the newspaper and sent to Peter Gaspar, an exiled Romanian professor in upstate New York, opens up the labyrinthine plot of Norman Manea\u2019s novel, The Lair.<\/em> In this elaborate, mysterious portrait of three exiles struggling to adapt to their adopted countries, nothing is what it seems and no lines are straight. The most serious threats are the unstated ones.<\/p>\n

Augustin Gora was the first to leave Romania. Granted asylum while in the United States on a Fulbright, Gora was able to establish himself in academia with the help of an older eminent Romanian \u00e9migr\u00e9, Cosmin Dima, a literary stand-in for Mircea Eliade. But Gora has withdrawn completely to his lair of books, his “cell of papyrus” where “the past is present and the present is an echo of the past.” To Gora\u2019s surprise, his ravishing, inscrutable wife Lu had refused to leave Romania with him. When she does show up in America years later, after Ceacescu\u2019s fall, it is with Gaspar, now her lover.<\/p>\n

The three form an uneasy love triangle that is soon overshadowed by the cryptic threat. Against his better judgment, Gaspar reviewed Dima\u2019s memoirs and exposed the “Old Man\u2019s” fascist sympathies and support for the Iron Guard in the 1930s, a red rag to Romanian nationalists at home and abroad. Not long after, a fellow \u00e9migr\u00e9 and former disciple of Dima\u2019s is shot dead and the threatening postcard arrives in Gaspar\u2019s mail. Gaspar begins calling Gora obsessively, mulling over the possible significance of minute details. Former students are drawn into the investigation\u2014perhaps suspects, perhaps innocent bystanders\u2014as is campus security, the state police, and the FBI<\/span>. <\/p>\n

The Lair<\/em> is by turns hypnotic, baffling, and intoxicating. It is a fascinating novel of ideas whose characters are on unsteady ground, having lost their footing in the Old World and not yet found an intellectual hold in the New.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As in years past, we will be highlighting all 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist, one by one, building up to the announcement of the 10 finalists on April 10th. A variety of judges, booksellers, and readers will write these, all under the rubric of “Why This Book Should Win. You can find the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[50266,25396,50276,1646,10146,22526,50286,19016],"class_list":["post-293286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba-2013-why-this-book-should-win","tag-norman-manea","tag-oana-marian","tag-review","tag-romanian-literature","tag-tess-lewis","tag-the-lair","tag-yale-university-press"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318456,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293286\/revisions\/318456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}