The start of this work interested me as it began in media res and I was excited to have a plot driven novella. At the beginning, with the talk of how people don’t have parties anymore and are ready to kill for a drop of gas, I was drawing parallels to our current situation today. I also noted the recurring themes of anxiety and over-thinkers in many of the workers we’ve looked at thus far. As well, I learned the word ‘logorrhea’ from page 256 meaning someone who talks too much which I will most certainly be using.

With characters’ names like ‘the Guileless One’, ‘the Kid, and ‘the Learned One’ and starting in action, the beginning was a bit hard to follow, but I warmed up to it as having a description for a name eases characterization. To me, this seemed like code names because of the theme of censorship and the paranoia of being constantly watched.

When the trenchcoat is referred to as ‘the one you see in all of the stores’, as opposed to ‘the one that __’ was wearing, it seemed as if the characters were subconsciously furthering themselves from the malignant mystery. The trenchcoat is characterized with a dark, ominous cloud around it and, as humans, it is easier for the mind to imagine the source as something distant that you see in the stores or in the movies. This evil air can be seen when the owner of said coat is referred to as ‘the culprit’ on page 267, despite them just having said ‘culprit’ over for dinner.

I am looking forward to hearing Manea in person because I feel like there is a symbol that I am missing when it comes to the coat, which I understand is the point. However, when the coat is described as ‘anthropomorphized’ on page 289, paired with ‘anyone can become anything’ (p. 293), there has to be some connection to the multifaceted nature of humanity or a historical meaning for communist Romania.

A feature of this novella that I enjoyed was Manea’s stream of consciousness style. The run-on dialogue ending with phrases like ‘what was I saying?’ or ‘you know’ made it seem very realistic and fast-paced. It also seemed as though the phrases the characters omitted from their speech or would replace with ‘you know’ furthered the theme of censorship. The stream of consciousness style heavily included repetition in both dialogue and descriptions. My question for you this week is how does Manea utilize repetition? Are there any points of repeating words or phrases that stood out to you?