Bengal Nights: A Novel
Read together with Maitreyi Devi's It Does Not Die (see below) these two moving novels--one written in 1933, the other more than 40 years later in response to the first--by two world-renowned intellectuals retell the story of their real love affair from two widely divergent perspectives. Eliade (1907-1986), best known as a theologian ( The Sacred and the Profane ), tells his version of the romance with Devi in a thinly disguised autobiographical novel. The narrator, Alain, a young French engineer, gradually enters a mystical realm of artistic energy, eroticism and timelessness when he meets and falls in love with the daughter of a senior colleague with whom he is staying in Calcutta. Alain sees in Maitreyi (whose name Eliade uses in the novel) what the West has stereotypically seen in the East: a mysterious pool of spirituality, irrationality and sensuousness. And, similarly typical of such visions, the relationship is doomed from the start for the very reasons that it remains so compelling.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.