Black Envelope

A melancholy tale of searching--for documents, for truth, for coffee--from the Romanian master

A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, an eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high school teacher on "moral grounds," is investigating his father's death forty years after the fact, and is drawn into a web of suspicion and black humor. Norman Manea's enigmatic and artful novel--set against the backdrop of life under the repressive Ceausescu regime--depicts the chaos and deprivation of Tolea's existence, and his tenuous grip on reality.