Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent

The short-sighted adolescent is a passionate reader who takes various cultural figures as models, trying to emulate both their lives or their works. The pupil protagonist is a poor student, who likes science and reads a lot of books, sometimes staying up all night to do so. At the age of 17, he decides to write a novel to demonstrate to his teachers that he is not as mediocre as his other classmates, and that he is prepared to give up everything he holds dear in order to do so. The novel is written in a number of notebooks - the 'diary' of the title - but our myopic hero ultimately fails 3 subjects and has to repeat the school year. Set in the Romanian capital in the early 20th century, from the perspective of a schoolboy's diary of his daily life, - his teachers, his classmates' academic and amorous rivalries, his first sexual experiences - we are introduced to the themes of religion, self-knowledge, erotic sensibility, artistic creation and otherness, ideas which would preoccupy him until the end of his life. Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent was written by the young Mircea Eliade - one of Romania's greatest writers and intellectuals.The book can be viewed as an early 20th century 'Catcher in the Rye', and allows us an intimate view of the developing genius, whose literary output has been neglected in the English language for too long.

About the Author :
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was a Romanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion of the 20th century. Eliade was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1,300 pieces over 60 years, including the novels Maitreyi (or Bengal Nights), Noaptea de Sânziene (The Forbidden Forest), Isabel și apele diavolului (Isabel and the Devil's Waters) and Romanul Adolescentului Miop (Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent), and the novellas Domnișoara Christina (Miss Christina) and Tinerețe fără tinerețe (Youth Without Youth), which was made into a feature film by Frances Ford Coppola in 2007, starring Tim Roth.

Review :
Nick Lezard's choice, The Guardian '. . .playful, ludicrous and very good teen journal, in English for the first time' 'Eliade may be describing the life of a student in a Romanian lycée of almost a century ago, but anyone who has ever been at school, full of ideals but also too shy to speak to the opposite sex, or incapable of revising for an exam until the very last minute, will relate to this. As will anyone who has ever committed their private thoughts to paper, as the true record of their soul and a rebuke to posterity.' "The power of Diary is that, while not being a novel unique to Romania, it can be read as metonymous of it. . . For all its boyish, slapdash sentiments, this is a refined piece of work." Alexander Clapp, TLS ". . . Istros Books publication of Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent, now the eighth of Eliade's novels in English, marks a turn of the tide.. . Moncrieff's translation, which adopts the idiom of the old English grammar school system, lends a vaguely unreal, Harry Potter-like air to the novel, enlivening the intellectual content." Bryan Rennie, LA Review of Books