Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent — Mircea Eliade

My attic is the same as ever: quiet, lonely, sad. I'm going to write The Novel of the Short-Sighted Adolescent. But I'll write it as if I'm writing the author's Diary. My book won't be a novel, but a collection of comments, notes, sketches for a novel. It's the only way of capturing reality, both natural and dramatic at once.

The short-sighted adolescent is a passionate reader who takes various cultural figures as models, trying to emulate both their lives and their works. The pupil protagonist is a poor student, who likes science and reads a lot of books, sometimes staying up all night to do so. At the age of 15, he decides to write a novel to demonstrate to his teachers that he is not as mediocre as all the other students, and is prepared to give up everything he holds dear for his art. The novel is written in a number of notebooks -- the "diary" of the title -- but our myopic hero ultimately fails in three subjects and is too lazy to learn and has to repeat the school year. Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent was written by the young Mircea Eliade, one of Romania's greatest writers and intellectuals. The book can be viewed as an early 20th century Catcher in the Rye, and allows us an intimate view of the developing genius -- his teachers, his classmates' academic and amorous rivalries, his first sexual experiences -- and an introduction to the themes of religion, self-knowledge, erotic sensibility, artistic creation, and otherness; ideas which would preoccupy him until the end of his life.