Bengal Nights
Bengal Nights is a book written by Mircea Eliade. The book was published in 1995 and is listed under the Fiction category. For readers who want to quickly understand what this title offers, this page gives a clear overview of the book, including its description, author information, page count, ratings, and ISBN details.
The full title of the book is Bengal Nights. When available, the subtitle is A Novel, which gives extra context about the theme, focus, or main idea behind the book. According to the available description, Set in 1930s Calcutta, this is a roman á clef of remarkable intimacy. Originally published in Romanian in 1933, this semiautobiographical novel by the world renowned scholar Mircea Eliade details the passionate awakenings of Alain, an ambitious young French engineer flush with colonial pride and prejudice and full of a European fascination with the mysterious subcontinent. 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.
This book has 184 pages, making it useful for readers who want to know the approximate length before starting. It has an average rating of 3.93, based on 245 ratings, which can help readers understand how other people have responded to it.
For cataloging and reference purposes, the ISBN-13 is 9780226204192, while the ISBN-10 is 0226204197. These numbers are helpful when searching for the exact edition of the book online, in libraries, or in bookstores.
The book cover image can be viewed here: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=n_oVTyKx7mcC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api.
Overall, Bengal Nights by Mircea Eliade is a title that may interest readers looking for books in Fiction. Whether you are researching new books, comparing editions, or building a reading list, this page gives you the most important details in one place.
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