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Of the five essays collected in On Clowns ("Romania," "On Clowns," "Censor's Report," "Felix Culpa," and "The History of an Interview," all written after the author's self-exile from Ceausescu's Romania in 1986), the most controversial, at least in Romania and in the Romanian diaspora, has been "Felix Culpa," a discussion of Mircea Eliade's intellectual career in light of his sympathy, in the 1930s, for Corneliu Codreanu's extreme right-wing movement known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael or the Iron Guard. "Felix Culpa," which I shall consider here in more detail presently, also suggests the larger thrust of Norman Manea's volume, its attempt to assess the impact and consequences of totalitarian political ideas or practices (right-wing or, after the war, communist) on the Romanian literary intelligentsia. One should note, however, that although Manea's essays are on the subject of Romania, they illustrate issues that are not confined to that country. Many of his observations will interest the student of modern Eastern Europe as well as the student of communism and its institutions. "Censor's Report" is one of the subtlest writings about the Kafkaesque functioning of communist censorship I have read; and "The History of an Interview" is a powerful account of devious persecution, a story about the kind of covert official anti-Semitism of which the author, the survivor of a wartime concentration camp in Transnistria, became an object in Ceausescu's national-communist Romania. One might use Manea's testimony to argue that Ceausescu's regime recycled older forms of (extreme) Romanian nationalism and combined them successfully with the dictator's original hard-line, primitive Stalinism. The effects were both...