"Time itself had sickened, and we belonged to it." With these words, Norman Manea introduces the reader to a world that has been torn apart by hatred and strife, a world in which everything has lost its meaning and every human bond has been severed. Out of this chaos, however, comes occasional redemption: inklings of hope, gestures of defiance, moments of moral and artistic epiphany. No reader will forget the image, in "Proust's Tea," of the little family huddled around. The figure of the grandfather, drinking ersatz tea, all eyes riveted on a lone sugar cube - the only one preserved from the days of normalcy and freedom - that hangs suspended from the ceiling, an invincible symbol of the past and a stubborn wisp of hope for the future. October; Eigbt O'Clock is a collection of thematically linked short stories that traces the course of one life through horrifying and tumultuous times. Yet it is the style of the writing itself. Allusive, moody poetic, evocative - that draws the reader into Manea's very personal and very original fictional world: the internment camps of the Ukraine ("Death," "The Sweater"), the troubled return home after the war ("Weddings," "The Balls of Faded Yarn"), the lingering, unhealed wounds that reopen many years later ("The Partition," "October, Eight O'Clock," "The Turning Point"). Manea's writing is rich, enveloping, intense; his stories have the force and power of. Myth and are capable of sudden and surprising emotional shifts whose grace and beauty leave the reader breathless. When these stories were published in Europe, critics compared them to the work of Bruno Schultz and Robert Musil and saw in Manea an heir to Kafka.