The Hooligan's Return: A Memoir

I know very little about Romanian history, and before reading this, absolutely nothing about Norman Manea but somehow, years ago, this memoir came to be on my bookshelf. I've been sipping it since April and I have to thank whatever bug prompted me to get this book. I'm sure I don't know enough about the writer or the times to contribute any opinion of merit but I did learn a lot, was greatly entertained by Mr. Manea's writing style, and here are a few quotes that resonated with me:

“Nazism defined its purpose in clear terms, kept its promises, rewarded its faithful, and annihilated its victims without hesitation, without offering them the chance to convert or to lie. In contrast, the Communism of universal happiness encouraged conversion lying, complicity, and was bit reluctant to devour even its most faithful. The thought police, so essential to the system, imposed a truth serving the Party. Between the increasingly irreconcilable promise and the reality, the field was open for suspicion, perversion, and fear.” “Memory must keep watch so that the horror is not repeated, we have been told over and over. We must hold on to identity, shared memory, race, ethnicity, religion, ideology. Having finally landed on the planet of pragmatism, you thought you might escape your past and your identity and become just a simple entity, a Gertrude Stein, the American in Paris, dreamed - only to find that Thursday's atrocities have become grist for the mottoes on Friday's T-shirts, an instantly marketable product for the collective memory.”“Suffering does not make us better people or heroes. Suffering, like all things human, corrupts, and suffering peddled publicly corrupts absolutely.”