Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent by Mircea Eliade review – Romania’s Adrian Mole

It’s hard to believe the author was the same age as his diarist when he wrote this playful, ludicrous and very good teen journal, in English for the first time

The plangently self-pitying teenager is a comic creation we are very familiar with: so now I ask you to imagine an Adrian Mole from 1920s Romania, more literate, more ridiculous, more histrionic and yet more self-aware; funnier, in short – yet written by someone who is the same age (17) as his protagonist.

Mircea Eliade is mostly remembered as an influential and respected Chicago-based professor of comparative religion; Saul Bellow read at his funeral. Eliade was also a novelist, but this novel was found in a Bucharest attic in 1986 (the year of his death), a circumstance so fitting – his narrator is fond of his own attic room, where he composes his diary – that I almost suspect some fabrication at work, as if the book were not by a 17-year-old but had been contrived by a much older, wiser and more cunning author. Another reason I entertained this suspicion was that, quite simply, it is too good.

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