On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist Book

This is Norman Manea as his best at least as non-fiction goes, with a collection of essays that are lucid, brutal and to the point; no quarter is given to the Romanian society and culture - both in the kneeling under communism posture but also in the more nationalistic stage that prospered so well after 1989 too.

Except for the Eliade bashing essay - discussing that is a matter on its own and I think that overall Mr. Manea did very well in bringing the past to life, while noting also that more about the topic came soon after so the topic would have come to light anyway and the hate addressed to N. Manea for this essay is misplaced, while as a matter of principle, shining light on darker corners of revered public personalities is always a good thing because it reminds us that everyone is fallible and however great an author's work is (eg M. Eliade's novel Forbidden Forest aka Noaptea de Sanzien leads my all time favorite book list) this does not make the author a saint, an oracle, a person of worship etc - the rest of the essays deal with the communist regime and the author's life and work under it. A book like this needs to be read when nostalgia for Ceausescu's "years of light" surfaces...

One niggle I had was the translation of the slogan "anii lumina" in "years of enlightenment" rather than the more appropriate imho "years of light" which give the sense in which the slogan was used to encompass all aspects of Romanian society which (in the vision of the slogan of course) under Ceausescu got so close to paradise , while years of enlightenment just remind one of bookish stuff

Anyway this book is highly recommended if you lived through those hell years or if you are interested in the pathology of a regime that started as force-fed Moscow communism, but then, when Stalin was dead and the Russian troops left, it transformed itself into a mixture of "national communism" (oxymoron but national socialism is inappropriate too) with Byzantine overtones that with a few changes here and there (eg substituting the working class worship for Orthodox Christianity and with selling the Jews to Israel for hard cash rather than killing them) would not have seemed out of place if the Legion would have led the country for a few decades...

The white horse was missing as Ceausescu, short and not that impressive physically, would have looked utterly silly on, but the scepter, the pseudo crown, the cape, the Pantheon of Romanian Heroes etc were all there; reading the essays in this book will give you a better sense of how these things worked in a nominal communist and Eastern block country