This document summarizes 5 novels that deal with themes of adolescence:
1. Mircea Eliade's "Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent" which follows a bookish teenage protagonist struggling with his ideals against real life.
2. George Calinescu's "Otilia's Secret" where the young protagonist Felix becomes obsessed with the feminine and flowering Otilia.
3. J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" tells the story of expelled teen Holden who spends a few days in New York experiencing stories that demoralize him.
4. Mircea Cartarescu's "Travesti" recalls
2. Mircea Eliade –Romanul adolescentului miop
(Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent)
George Calinescu -Enigma Otiliei
(Otilias`s Secret)
Jerome David Salinger-De veghe in lanul de secara
(The Catcher in the Rye)
Mircea Cartarescu-Travesti
(Travesti)
Ionel Teodoreanu-La Medeleni
(At Medeleni)
3. Mircea Eliade
Romanul adolescentului miop
(Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent)
4. Although speech is very personalized, the novel
has the quality to enable us to rediscover the
spiritual tragedy of teenager Mircea. Basically it's
every teenage lover of books, his inner world
beautiful, lived only from books. Facing real life
beyond the attic windows, sometimes removes his
ideals Eliade and reveals that he is vulnerable.
However, such wandering can not change the
essence of his soul and does not alter the character
of what we can determine.
The “Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent” we
encounter a young high school teenager who wants
to write a chronicle of adolescence like no one
wrote. Leaving the bend is worn daily, drunk with
power that gives them immediate transcription,
Eliade is indeed an authentic portrait of
adolescence, consisting of game friendships and
loves, struggles and aspirations of the typical age of
a tense pursuit future promises, the merciless gaze
thrown adult world.
5. The “Novel of the Nearsighted adolescent “
presents us with rigor, courage and a young soul
exceptionally naive. We are made partakers of his
struggle, the victories and failures, especially as it
began understand the destiny of a great man.
Everything is translated on paper with much irony
and a deliberate (but just failed so) cold and
clearance.
Do not start reading this novel with an eye to
Eliade's other works, because it may miss its charm
and meaning. Read the novel and possibly lightly
gripped by nostalgia of high school. The power lies
in its simplicity and in naivitate.Este a novel
without the final, because life ends with the
beginning of Eliade.
7. Felix Sima, a young man of 18 years, coming to
Bucharest, at the Faculty of Medicine, and goes to
his uncle, Mr. Costache Giurgiuveanu that hosting
the study period. It is difficult to accommodate life
in the capital, his situation is more tense and death
of his mother and then his father, Dr. Sima, who
also left recently, leaving his legacy in the hands of
Costache, his brother in law.
One of the reasons literature is the love that
awakens and spreads around Otilia. Felix, medical
student, becomes obsessed with Otilia. She seems to
be very feminine, when her grace - teen flowering.
Wants to live his life with intensity and, like any
young girl is searching for happiness: "Otilia lived
as play at the piano, shattering and gently (...)”.
9. Holden Caulfield, the narrator, a teenager expelled
from four schools, leaving home a few days before the
date set, planning to spend some time in liberty in New
York, his hometown. In the few days he comes into
contact with more people and pass through stories that
constantly demoralises him at the end of the novel the
reader finding out what, in fact, it was not hard to
guess: that Holden tells his story in a mental hospital .
Holden is a frustrated teenager with serious attitude
problems. Although most teenagers go through this
identity crisis, they manage to overcome most of the
times with his friends help and sometimes with family.
Unfortunately, this solution does not work for Holden, a
kid who, though theoretically has some friends at school
and in New York, does not feel close to any of them and
at the same time, increasingly away from than family.
Moreover, throughout the novel, although he
considered himself a mature man, his actions show
otherwise. Holden is immature in terms of social
inadequacy and even regressing when the novel is close
to final.
11. Travesti is Victor’s story, a successful writer who
recalls his boyhood, especially one of the
experiences of a trip during high school experience
that there seems to be marked. remembrance makes
Victor - Mature, now at 34, then that is exactly
twice the age.
The teenager Victor, a ninth grader at the School
of Cantemir in Bucharest,want to embark on a
initiatory journey to Budila, a journey that would
somehow alter its perception of the concepts of
time. Victor is a misfit, a budding genius, a solitar.
He knows that he lives to write and strongly
believes that his life will be an ascetic to imagine
writing in an attic poor, the novel of life for people
who will be glorified, but that probably only after
its entry into posterity.
12. The typical story of one that society ignores, who
has become a successful writer but, surrounded by
fame and money he realized that he is not happy.
Beyond the individual, social adolescence relates to
plans that have shaped it over time. Always
present the theme of adolescence remains a point of
interest to contemporary writers, who relate to the
existential drama of contemporary heroes, as
happened to the characters from Travesti by
Mircea Cartarescu.
14. At Medeleni who consecrated Ionel Teodoreanu.
It is a novel of an sentimental education. Even if
first Volume depicts the childhood and the past, to
that of youth itself, Danut, Monica, Olguta and
others are some eternal teens through mentality .
Focused on two common themes in the work of
Ionel Teodoreanu - childhood and adolescence - the
cycle of Medeleni represents a novel of a family ,of
an age, a generation. The first book - a monograph
of pure and fragile childhood like white flowers of
apricot (the symbol used by the writer so often) - is
invigorated by the liveliness and antics of the age.
15. The second volume, dedicated to high school life,
adolescence, foreshadows the destinies of heroes,
what better shape in third volumeof maturation - a
process that takes place on the idyllic way of life
collapse, of giving up paradise. The book contains a
series of heroes, especially the young, has three
protagonists: Danut, Olguta and Monica.
Danut is the author's alter ego,a
romantic.Olguta likes to mystify reality precisely
because of its realistic and sober spirit, Monica is a
link between those two extremes. Along with the
novels of M. Drumes or Gr Bajenaru, which
presents them in a familiar way and picturesque
life of their students, accepting melodramatic and
promoting troubleshooting more spectacular than
dramatic who is typical for novel.