Identity Reconfigurations, Memory and Personal History in Norman Manea and Saul Bellow’s ‘Spoken Book’

Abstract

In their paper, “Identity Reconfigurations, Memory and Personal History in Norman Manea and Saul Bellow’s Spoken Book, ”Simona Antofi and Nicoleta Ifrim analyze the book of interviews Settling My Accounts Before I Go Away: A Words & Images Interview, a two-authored mirror-like writing in which two biographical courses and two scriptural identities engage in dialogue. Their aim is to define a double reading effect embedded into the self-oriented narrative: a collective history of the Jewish exile from the communist totalitarian space (Soviet and Romanian) towards the “promised land,” with literary, cultural and political insertions; then, the legitimation of an implicit “identity pilgrimage” of the two writers in dialogue, with peculiarities stemming from each one’s existential path, in permanent reference to dominant history. Aside from the latent "Jewish question," which subtextually directs the existential and cultural choices of the two writers-confessors, the intercultural dialogue with the European and American literary space also marks the becoming of some problematic identities projected onto the inside of their own “life stories.”