The Hooligan's Return

“An extraordinary book.”—Larissa MacFarquhar, New Yorker

“This world of ours, in his view, is a place where the ridiculous reigns supreme over all human life and tortures everyone without respite, and therefore it cannot be ignored because it’s not about to ignore any of us. . . . He has in mind all those, including himself, who were left to pay the fool in one of history’s many traveling circuses.”—Charles Simic, New York Review of Books

“The ’sad country, full of humour’ that was, and still is, Romania has had no finer and percipient chronicler of its sorrows and absurdities. . . . He is one of an immensely humane and intelligent stature.”—Paul Bailey, Times Literary Supplement

“A distinguished writer whose vision of totalitarianism is closer to Kafka’s cloudy menace, universal, and yet internalized, than to Orwell’s brass tacks. . . . The artistry of the implication, the intensity of what can seem a dream state, draws us imperceptibly through a half-lighted window for lack of the door.”—Richard Eder, New York Times

“It is that kaleidoscopic excursion into recent and remote yesterdays that forms the bulk of The Hooligan’s Return, peopled with many touching moments and characters. All is recounted with the caustic dexterity and lyrical power we would expect from the accomplished novelist who gave us Compulsory Happiness and The Black Envelope.”—Ariel Dorfman, New York Times Book Review

“Mature, difficult, and rich in irony and paradox. . . . The Hooligan’s Return peels back the facile like a pelt. It is a performance both excruciating and ferociously controlled. The result may well rank among the finest memoirs in a generation.”—Mark Slouka, San Francisco Chronicle

“A genuinely great book, an entire teeming life seized and made permanent.”—Robert Boyers, New Republic

Awarded Prix Médicis Etranger 2006

“I am profoundly grateful for this living, flesh-and-blood, yet unearthly memoir.”—Cynthia Ozick

“A fascinating, beguiling record of the almost incredible events that can transpire in one life, especially if that life is lived in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. The Hooligan’s Return operates on so many levels that finally it eludes all classifications and reveals itself as art.”—Francine Prose