Volume 50, Number 16 · October 23, 2003
The Golden Age of Hatred
By Charles Simic
The Hooligan's Return
by Norman Manea, translated from the Romanian by Angela Jianu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 385 pp., $30.00
I first came across Norman Manea's name in 1991 when I read an essay of his in The New Republic on the concealed fascist past of Mircea Eliade, the widely known Romanian scholar of comparative religion and the author of such authoritative works as Shamanism and A History of Religious Ideas: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries. The revelation was not exactly news to me. In 1972, with my friend Vasko Popa, a Serbian poet of Romanian origin, I met the philosopher Émile Cioran in Paris. We spent the afternoon chatting in his attic apartment and walking in the Luxembourg Gardens. In the evening we were joined by Mircea Eliade and all four of us went to dinner. The conversation was partly in Romanian, partly in English for my benefit, so I have hardly any idea what all their talk was about. Afterward, I was astonished to learn from Popa that both Cioran and Eliade had been fascists in their youth.
Review, 3804 words
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