Jean Harris

Jean Harris

Jean Harris

Jean Harris is a novelist, essayist, and translator now living in Bucharest, Romania. In 2007, Harris was the grant recipient from the U.C. Irvine International Centre for Writing and Translation, and her Romanian translations have appeared in The Guardian and Habitus, as well as in Norman Manea’s 2012 collection of essays The Fifth Impossibility, published by Yale University Press.

cover image of the book Captives

Captives

by Norman Manea

Translated by Jean Harris

Acclaimed writer Norman Manea’s Captives is a kaleidoscopic, imagistic, and stylistically innovative look into the lives of three characters: an alienated piano teacher, an engineer reflecting on his youth, and a veteran who suffers through daily life long after surviving the battles of World War II.

Divided into interrelated sections—narrated in first-, second-, and third- person voices—Captives explores the social and psychological conditions of postwar Romania: a loss of identity, a complicated sense of guilt and trauma from having survived the fascist government during World War II, and the rise of communism.

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