Youth without Youth

Youth without Youth

by Mircea Eliade (Author), Matei Calinescu (Editor), Francis Ford Coppola (Author), Mircea Eliade (Author), Mac Linscott Ricketts (Translator), Francis Ford Coppola (Author), Matei Calinescu (Editor), Mircea Eliade (Author)

Synopsis

This is soon to be a major motion picture starring Tim Roth and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Bucharest, 1938: while Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the Iron Guard. Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history - a man who thought his life was over - lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity. At the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science, lies Mircea Eliade's novella. Now, in its first paperback edition, the psychological thriller features Dominic Matei, an elderly academic who experiences a cataclysmic event that allows him to live a new life with startling intellectual capacity. Sought by the Nazis for their medical experiments on the potentially life-prolonging power of electric shocks, Matei is helped to flee through Romania, Switzerland, Malta, and India. Newly endowed with prodigious powers of memory and comprehension, he finds himself face-to-face with the glory and terror of the supernatural. In this surreal, philosophy-driven fantasy, Eliade tests the boundaries of literary genre as well as the reader's imagination. Suspenseful, witty, and poignant, Youth Without Youth illuminates Eliade's longing for past loves and new texts, his erotic imagination, and his love of a thrilling mystery. It will be adapted for the screen in 2007 as Francis Ford Coppola's first feature film in over ten years.

$16.25

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 148
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 30 Nov 2007

ISBN 10: 0226204154
ISBN 13: 9780226204154

Media Reviews
Comparisons with Borges, Cortazar, Calvino, and others...are beside the point. Eliade was always out on a limb of his own. - New York Times I was excited to discover in this tale by Eliade the key themes that I most hope to understand better: time, consciousness, and the dream-like basis of reality. For me it is indeed a return to the ambitions I had for my work in cinema as a student. - Francis Ford Coppola A wonderful blend of realism, surrealism, and fantasy, [Eliade's novellas] suggest the importance of the mythic and the supernatural to finding meaning in the everyday. Highly recommended. - Library Journal Youth Without Youth reads like a surreal collaboration by Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, and Carl Jung. Mircea Eliade left me with the rare sense that I had been entertained by a genius. - William Allen, author of Starkweather and The Fire in the Birdbath and Other Disturbances
Author Bio
Mircea Eliade (1907 - 86) was a Romanian philosopher and historian of religions who moved to Chicago in 1957. His works include The Sacred and the Profane and A History of Religious Ideas. Mac Linscott Ricketts is professor emeritus of philosophy and religion at Louisburg College.