Obligatory Happiness

Obligatory Happiness is a novella collection by Romanian writer Norman Manea, translated from Romanian by Wang Zhonghao and Gao Borui and published in June 2019 by New Star Press as part of the Norman Manea Series; it marks the first appearance of this work in Chinese. The volume collects four novellas—The Interrogation, The Biography of a Robot, A Window for the Working Class, and The Raincoat—which were previously published in Romania in 1981 and in Germany in 1987 and 1988. The title Fericirea Obligatorie, literally "obligatory happiness," is a phrase coined by Manea to capture the regulated, dominated life of the late Ceaușescu era, when happiness became a duty that people had to perform. The four stories turn their lens on dissidents, civil servants, workers, and intellectuals, depicting work, family, and daily trivia—queuing for bread and milk, crowded buses, unlit streetlamps at night, underheated rooms, armed patrols, ubiquitous suspicion and self-censorship. The book almost never depicts the regime head-on, yet its critique is most powerful precisely through the behavior of ordinary people. Unlike Western fantasies that spectacularize totalitarian society, Manea's world is not a grotesque exotic realm but a subtler, more complex "human reality" mingling fear and dignity, resistance and nihilism, mockery and exhaustion. His narration is calm on the surface yet often erupts into dense, frenzied long sentences that assail the reader like machine-gun fire, bearing a distinctly Kafkaesque quality. Four pieces, lean yet extremely dense, make this an essential literary text for understanding the Eastern European experience and twentieth-century political life.