The Trenchcoat Reflection

Hello, I’m back at it yet again to talk a bit about this week’s book: The Trenchcoat by Norman Manea. On the whole, I found the book kind of confusing to read. The start feels like it throws us into the story very quickly, and we are left to try and figure it out on our own. There is also quite a bit of mystery and uncertainty throughout the book, which made it interesting, but also more difficult to understand. The whole “whose trenchcoat is this?” debacle was kind of frustrating, and I remember thinking “who cares? It’s just a jacket”. This whole ordeal seemed very petty and inconsequential to me while reading it.

In this regard, I found the lecture as well as the discussion video with Manea himself to be very helpful. I had fully missed the underlying theme that Manea was trying to highlight, that being Romanian totalitarianism and communism, but the story is starting to make more sense to me with that in mind. I was also completely unaware of what the trenchcoat signified, so I’m glad that Manea was able to clarify that it is associated with the Romanian secret police at the time.

I found the style of writing in the book to be quite interesting. For the most part, it’s just regular conversations, quite similar to that of everyday life. It kind of feels like almost nothing happens for most of it, even though things are happening, they are just subtle or seemingly insignificant at first (like The Trenchcoat). This writing style reminds me of Anton Chekhov’s plays (specifically, The Seagull), in which (like The Trenchcoat), very little happens plot-wise and much of it is communicated in plain everyday conversations. Chekhov is also known to be a ‘naturalistic’ writer, in that this seemingly boring conversational approach accurately reflects how life is most of the time. I’m not sure if this was a goal of Manea’s, but it’s interesting to think about. This sort of mundane, everyday conversational approach to The Trenchcoat can make it feel boring or slow at times, but once again, hearing Manea speak about the significance of the book in his own life and how it relates to totalitarianism and state censorship/surveillance was quite helpful and profound. I have a new appreciation and interest with this book because of it, and I think things would be a lot clearer to me if I read it a second time.

Thanks for reading my post, and I’ll be back next week to discuss Jose Saramago’s Death with Interruptions (sounds cheery!)

Question: What did you think about the fogginess and uncertainty in the book? Did you find it frustrating or interesting (or both, like me)?