Mandatory happiness

At the heart of the four narratives of Compulsory Happiness is the little man living among the nightmares of the police state of ordinary suffering, depicted at the same time creepily and satirically. Kafka’s stories seek the answer to what it means to live in fear and survive a cruel dictatorship with corrupt cunning. In Manea’s lyrics, the tragic reality mixed with fantasy is driven by bizarre forces: incoherence, unspeakability, absurdity. Mandatory Happiness, illusion, makes the reader sober and warns that in incompetent situations, roles can be easily swapped at any time. Norman Manea (1936) is a recognized writer not only in Romania but worldwide. He is the author of countless short stories, essays and novels, mainly on the Holocaust, the everyday life of communist life and exile. The author, currently living in New York, is the holder of several awards and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize several times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Júlia Vallasek (1975, Cluj-Napoca), translator, literary historian, critic, assistant professor at the Babe-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. His translations from English and Romanian have been published regularly in literary journals, independent volumes and anthologies since 1997. His main works: Nicolae Balotă: The Image of the Invisible (Cluj-Napoca 2000); Mikhail Sebastian: Diary (1935-1944) (Cluj-Napoca, 2009); Jane Austen: Letters (Cluj-Napoca 2014); Mircea Eliade: Maitreyi. Bengali Night (Budapest 2015). He selected and edited the Twentieth-Century Romanian Short Stories in the Modern Decameron series, in which, among other things, Norman Manea’s short story Teachers was published in his translation.