Norman Manea’s new novel, “Exiled Shadow “ is a psychological, cerebral book written in the form of a collage, in which the experiences of a Holocaust survivor tie in with his later struggles in a communist dictatorship, and his American exile. The narrative unfolds concurrently on multiple levels, centering on the protagonist’s passion for reading and his intense love for—and intimacy with—his half-sister, with whom he once shared the horrors of the camps. Facing an existence full of changes and contradictions, the two siblings attempt both to find a balance in life and to mitigate the effects of their shared dark past.
The friendship, the differences of opinion between the protagonist, the Misanthropic Nomad, and Gunther, an ethnic-German Romanian exiled in Berlin, his childhood friend and a critic of the communist dictatorship in Romania, obsessed with the Holocaust and German guilt, define the book’s retrospective of the twentieth-century dramatic events nationalism, fascism, anti- semitism, communism and exile.As the embodiment of identity, the metaphor of the shadow acts as a leitmotif over the epic span of the novel, expressing uncertainty of the destinies and its multiple complications as well as the estrangements they undergo. Structured around frequent quotations from other literary texts and, more importantly, references to Adelbert von Chamisso's classic German story about the man who sold his shadow and to Robert Musil's modern epic, The Man Without Qualities, the true subject of the narrative remains literature, as a form of life and an expression of identity. As an epithom, this novelistic experiment, a vibrant mosaic of voices, sources, and stories takes as a center of the plot the shadow-the insubstantial shape of the exile, the wandering Jew, the death camp survivor, the individual under totalitarianism, the dark side of the Jungian personality- a figure that calls into question the boundaries of the human condition. At the end of the book, the reader feels a close conection to the ironic and melancholy Nomad, who guides us with humour, acuity, and his resolute determination to survive his last exile, from socialist Romania to America “'where everything is possible”.
