Customer Reviews

The Old Man and the Bureaucrats

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a good introduction to Eliade's fiction. Eliade is more known as a scholar than a fiction writer, but he produced some wonderful stories, of which this is one. This is one of the few fictional works currently available, but any reader who enjoys this as much as I did will no doubt embark upon a quest to discover more Eliade books. I esp. recommend "Mystic Tales".

This novella is 128 pages of fairly large print, but it seems much longer, almost endless. Since I am a professor of literature, reading and interpretation are my business, but I found this brief fantasy (if it really is a fantasy) to be convoluted (deliberately so) and confusing - a sort of mishmash: the slightest of plots made complicated by various layers of narrative crushed into a clump, with a nod toward the structure and content of the ARABIAN NIGHTS. The "old man" is one of fiction's most annoying narrators, so much so that one begins to sympathize with the bureaucrats who interrogate him. Although I have not yet read enough of Eliade's fiction to make a fair generalization, it seems that he may suffer from Robert Grave's disorder - being so enamoured of a particular notion that he compromises his creative and especially his scholarly work by imposing that notion upon it. I would be happy to discover that I am mistaken, but his being embraced by the New Agers (with Gimbutas, Graves, and Murray) is a bad omen.