What Eliade gives us is an evocative if disquieting slice of his early life and times ... However retrospectively adapted, Eliade’s two slim volumes of juvenilia anticipate much of what now passes for life-writing, autofiction or even creative non-fiction. Neither was intended for publication and both only appeared some fifty years later ... It is high time that a significant author who spoke, read or wrote in eight languages should have the full scope of his work represented in English.
Constitutes a formerly unavailable source of insight into the thought of this versatile author, as well as being edifying reading in its own right ... can be read as evidence of Eliade’s literary status, of the development of his understanding of the history of religions, of his relation to anti-Semitism, and of his unfortunate sexism, and these four interdigitate intriguingly.
Although the literary value of novels written so early in life is rarely exceptional, their value as a historical and psychological document cannot be underestimated ... The young Eliade both makes himself and writes himself with a fury.
[Eliade] writes beautifully about nature and the buzz of student gatherings, although his lengthy, staged conversations with friends about faith and meaning grow wearing ... Eliade has been criticised for his links to the far-right Iron Guard, but two boorish antisemites get short shrift here. More troubling is the self-important sexism, as he castigates the “mediocrity of sentimental girls”, and treats the two women in his life as objects to be moulded or abandoned ... 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.
