The Black Envelope

A melancholy tale of searchingfor documents, for truth, for coffeefrom 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 fathers death forty years after the fact, and is drawn into a web of suspicion and black humor. Norman Maneas enigmatic and artful novelset against the backdrop of life under the repressive Ceausescu regimedepicts the chaos and deprivation of Toleas existence, and his tenuous grip on reality.