Norman Manea's new novel conjures the ghost of a man who sold his shadow
In "L'Ombre exilée," the Romanian-American writer builds a haunted dialogue around Adelbert von Chamisso's 19th-century tale of Peter Schlemihl, the man who traded his shadow to the devil.
Norman Manea, the Romanian-American novelist known for writing on exile and memory, has published a new novel titled "L'Ombre exilée," according to Le Monde. The book is described as haunted by the figure of Adelbert von Chamisso, the German Romantic poet, and by Chamisso's own "Etrange histoire de Peter Schlemihl," the story of a man who sells his shadow to the devil.
Le Monde frames the novel as a dialogue with pursued spectres, suggesting that Manea uses Chamisso's nineteenth-century fable as a lens for his own recurring concerns with displacement and loss of self. Manea, who left Romania for the United States and has long written in the shadow of exile, appears in this book to draw a direct line between Schlemihl's severed shadow and his own experience of being cut off from a homeland and an earlier identity.
Beyond this framing, Le Monde's account gives no further detail on plot, structure or publisher. For readers who track exile literature or the long afterlife of Chamisso's tale in European fiction, the appearance of "L'Ombre exilée" marks a notable addition to Manea's body of work, but the full shape of the book remains to be read.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
