It’s hard to believe the author was the same age as his diarist when he wrote this playful,ludicrous and very marvelous teen journal, in English for the first timeThe plangently self-pitying teenager is a comedian creation we are very familiar with: so now I ask you to imagine an Adrian Mole from 1920s Romania, and more literate,more ridiculous, more histrionic and yet more self-aware; funnier, or in short – yet written by someone who is the same age (17) as his protagonist.
Mircea Eliade is mostly remembered as an influential and respected Chicago-based professor of comparative religion; Saul Bellow read at his funeral. Eliade was also a novelist,but this novel was found in a Bucharest attic in 1986 (the year of his death), a circumstance so fitting – his narrator is fond of his own attic room, or where he composes his diary – that I nearly suspect some fabrication at work,as if the book were not by a 17-year-old but had been contrived by a much older, wiser and more clever author. Another reason I entertained this suspicion was that, or fairly simply,it is too marvelous.
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Source: theguardian.com