|
Bengal Nights: A Novel
|
| List Price: | $17.50 |
| Price: | $13.13 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com
41 new or used available from $3.55
Average customer review:
Product Description
Offered the hospitality of a senior Indian colleague, Alain grasps at the chance to discover the authentic India firsthand. He soon finds himself enchanted by his host's daughter, the lovely and inscrutable Maitreyi, a precocious young poet and former student of Tagore. What follows is a charming, tentative flirtation that soon, against all the proprieties and precepts of Indian society, blossoms into a love affair both impossible and ultimately tragic. This erotic passion plays itself out in Alain's thoughts long after its bitter conclusion. In hindsight he sets down the story, quoting from the diaries of his disordered days, and trying to make sense of the sad affair.
A vibrantly poetic love story, Bengal Nights is also a cruel account of the wreckage left in the wake of a young man's self discovery. At once horrifying and deeply moving, Eliade's story repeats the patterns of European engagement with India even as it exposes and condemns them. Invaluable for the insight it offers into Eliade's life and thought, it is a work of great intellectual and emotional power.
"Bengal Nights is forceful and harshly poignant, written with a great love of India informed by clear-eyed understanding. But do not open it if you prefer to remain unmoved by your reading matter. It is enough to make stones weep." — Literary Review
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was the Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor in the Divinity School and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Many of his scholarly works, as well as his two-volume autobiography and four-volume journal, are published by the University of Chicago Press. Translated into French in 1950, Bengal Nights was an immediate critical success. The film, Les Nuits Bengali, appeared in 1987.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #138966 in Books
- Published on: 1995-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 184 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780226204192
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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.
From Kirkus Reviews
Eliade (19071986), a major figure in the scholarly study of world religions, tells his version of younger days and of what his ``research'' in India was really all about. This is the roman … clef about a torrid young love blown apart by cultural and colonial chasms in response to which, years later, Maitreyi Devi wrote It Does Not Die (see above). Alain, Eliade's persona in the story, comes to take up residence with an Indian family who have a sublime, mysteriously beautiful daughter, Maitreyi. Though the blossoming young woman has read widely in English, American, and Indian literature, Alain sees in her and her sister a certain savage Otherness that intrigues him. As the young man and the teenager spend more and more time together, they are drawn together and end up, of course, spending passionate nights behind closed doors. As Alain discovers that even the recently virginal Maitreyi knows the sexual secrets of the East, the two are tortured by a foreknowledge that their affair will be discovered by the teen's modernizing, but still traditional, Hindu family. After the younger sister blabs and the father sends Alain away, Maitreyi becomes a victim of her father's physical wrath. Tormented and grandiose (``I suffered ten times more than she at the idea of the punishments she would suffer''), Alain retreats to the Himalayas to tell fellow seekers of Indian truth that they are merely romantics who, unlike him, don't know the real story behind the mysteries of the East. In the end, Alain seems at most to have found that his fantasies don't hold up to concrete experience rather than to have come to any authentic understanding of India. A typical colonial tale of adventure and conquest, with too many fantastic edges to come across as being about actual human beings. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French
Customer Reviews
Mad, out of control, beautiful
This book is a dream, a message, a powerful explosion of signs, a bloody and mangled corpse left by the passage of some hurricane. In the year of the great success of "Monsoon Wedding" this book more than ever deserves to be read and wept about.
Is this the confession of a repentant Adam, come to weep at the gates of Eden where he so briefly knew bliss? Is it the war story of a proud and Faustian soul who learns European reason after tasting the blood of innocents? Is it the testimony of an emasculated Abelard, who can remember but can no longer experience the passion of his wretched Eloise?
All of these, all of these and much that cannot be justly set forth besides. The style is awkward, at times clumsy, but the life of this book is so vivid, so true, so radiant and bewildering, it reminds me of what many religious teachers have said: that if a man tried to look at God directly, though he would be filled with inexpressible joy, he would also certainly die. In that sense this book is a near-death experience.
It gets off to a shaky start, a bit like a model-T Ford being wound up on a dusty road, but soon you are captured into a whirlwind of passion and ideas, a kind of psychedelia, with levels and reversals of meaning radiating off into space in every direction: as the other reviewers have said -- colonialism, Hinduism and Christianity (and what is Christianity but prophetic Judaism captured and set to music by exiled Indian temple priests), romance, pride, purity, childhood, selfishness, devotion, promise, punishment, renunciation...
Like all Romanian poets, Eliade's motto should be "Lord, grant me only this vision!" His vision burns with the intensity of an acetylene arc. May the reader shield his eyes and turn it to good use.
The XXth century's love story novel
When this book first appeared they said that, same as every century has its love story novel, the XXth century has "Bengal Nights" (original title: "Maitrey") for its own love story novel. I used to believe that a scientist such as Eliade couldn't write fine literature. After reading "Bengal Nights" I found out I was mistaking. It is an excellent written book that tells an wonderfull story.
A MUST READ!
I read this book when I was about sixteen, and it moved me profoundly.BENGAL NIGHTS, which is known in original version as Maitrey recounts the story of two lovers by the name of Alain and Maitrey. Of course that the story has something true, indeed, Eliade fell in love with Dasgupta's daughter Maitrey.Just imagine that the love story narrated in the novel, happened in reality. Also, must be remembered that Eliade was very much influenced by the "balkan supreme sacrifice" when he wrote Bengal Nights. And if you read more of his work, you will see that the same kind of sacrifice is found in "From Primitives to.." or in "The myth of the eternal return". I am talking, of course, the tracico-dacico mythology, where the death is seen not as the ultimate step of existence but as a gate to another world. For example, the dacians were proud to die, and only the most worthy of them was put to death. Now, in the novel you can see the same thing , but the supreme sacrifice is dedicated to love. And here comes the contribution of the indian mythology, where love and sexuality play a very important role. Whereas in the european mythology, the love is concealed by the Christian Church. Well, this is the substratum of the story anyway. And is just an opinion of mine. Nevertheless, add this book to the shopping cart now, and you will experience something that a very few books could make you feel!
