Customer Reviews

Youth Without Youth (Univ. of Chicago)

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Youth Without Youth is a powerful and insightful novella written by Mircea Eliade, the Romanian philosopher and historian (1907-1986). The book which sets in the pre World War II era , tells a story of an ageing professor, Dominic Matei, coming to the end of the line, whose mysterious regeneration and rejuvenation make him a target for hunting down by the Nazis and others as well as having to confront a whole range of issues and dilemmas now that he is made young again with superhuman powers and given a second chance in life. The story moves through different countries and cultures from Romania, Switzerland, Malta to India spanning the richness of Eastern and Western cultures.

This is a thriller, love story and the "Butterfly Dream" philosophy of the Chinese philosopher, Zhuangzi(Chuang-tzu) - the dream-like nature of reality - all wrapped into one.

This thoughtful and insightful work has now been adapted for the screen in 2007 by the award-winning Francis Ford Coppola of the "Godfather" fame, his latest and most defining film in almost ten years. I have great hopes that Coppola, the dependable and talented producer/director and Tim Roth, an excellent and highly intelligent actor/director who takes his art/craft with utmost gravity (playing the leading role Dominic Matei) will do justice to this exquisite book. Whatever you do, don't miss the book and the film!

Eliade's story is breathtaking, with a deep hidden message, a story that works on so many levels. Read it and you shall not regret it. The movie, while good is confusing and misses the main point of the story.

There are lots of novels out there that attempt to be something profound, that try and create something meaningful and complete. Some of these novels succeed and yet many fail miserably. I don't really know where `Youth Without Youth' falls for I'm still trying to figure out just what exactly it was trying to be `profound' about.

The problem I have with `Youth Without Youth' is that upon closing the book I felt very unfulfilled, as if I had no real idea of what I was supposed to have been enlightened on. In the forward, written by Academy Award winning director Francis Ford Coppola (who just so happens to direct the movie adaptation of this novella), we are told that when making a movie sometimes it is best to make a movie about a subject you don't understand or base it on a question you don't know the answer to. Coppola says that in the process of making the movie you come to find the answer.

I guess maybe I need to see the movie.

Mircea Eliade's novella `Youth Without Youth' takes place in pre-World War II times and follows the strange journey of Dominic Matei, an aging man who is given a chance to relive his life so-to-speak when a lightening bolt strikes him, rejuvenating his body and giving him `power beyond what is normal'. Dominic is an interesting man, steeped heavily in philosophy and religion and language, and when he is made young again his memory and ability to grasp and ascertain is strengthened. This makes him the prime candidate for study and experimentation by the Nazi's.

I won't really get too far into the bulk of the story; it's kind of all over the place anyway. It leaves a lot of questions left unanswered in the end, questions that leave me furious since I was expecting something grand in closing to tie everything together. Eliade make's mention within this novella of time being an ambiguous thing, and so maybe the point of this novella was to elicit conversation and further research into the wonderment that is `time', but I don't feel compelled to do that. I feel like I wasted my `time' in attempting to enjoy something that is rather confusing and bland.

There was so much that could have been done here. Maybe the whole `novella' thing was a bad idea; maybe if only the story had been longer then it could have truly been fleshed out. The story wants to be all things and encompass so much that it never gives enough attention to anything long enough to make it remotely understandable and or interesting.

I still long to see the film, if only to see Coppola's return to the directors seat after being absent for too long (ten years is a long time to be out of pocket). I hope that Coppola was able to bring some sense to this story; for I'm certain that underneath it all there is a great story, a great prose and I'm almost positive there is a great `theory', I just couldn't find it.

Youth Without Youth is the wet dream of a phenomenologist. Mircea Eliade, a well-known scholar of religion, wrote this novella when he was 69. Its protagonist, Dominic Matei, is also an aging Romanian academic approaching 70, whose life's frustrated desire had been to find and describe the originating meaning of life. Although Dominic's preoccupation with this search for Truth precluded the love offered to him, his investigations were thwarted by his inability to fully control ancient languages. Finding himself in an early stage of dementia, Dominic travels to a distant town to commit suicide. There he is hit by lightning, causing a miraculous revitalization of both his body and mind. To avoid being apprehended by the Romanian Security for his purported links with the Romanian fascists or abducted by the Gestapo for scientific examination in Germany, he disguises his identity with the help of his doctor and the Rockefeller Foundation. His heightened intelligence collapses time, providing him remarkable access to the past and allowing him to see the future. It also provides him a new access to beautiful women, through whom he approaches the truth that he has long been seeking. He returns from his fantasy only to die as an old man in the snow outside his old café. The novel is creepily autobiographical. Not only is it full of only partially masked personal fixations and experiences, but also it is misogynously self-obsessed. Youth Without Youth has nothing to do with Borges, as is claimed on the dust jacket, but it does have much in common with the plots, if not the literary distinction, of Goethe's Faust and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Eliade's story, in any case, is more compellingly told by Francis Ford Coppola in his 2007 film.

This is one of those rare moments when the movie is better than the book