Présentation de l'éditeur :
Precocious, a poet, a philosopher's daughter, Maitreyi Devi was sixteenyears old in 1930 when Mircea Eliade came to Calcutta to study with herfather. More than forty years passed before Devi read Bengal Nights, the novel Eliade had fashioned out of their encounter, onlyto find small details and phrases, even her given name, bringing backepisodes and feelings she had spent decades trying to forget. It Does Not Die is Devi's response. In part a counter to Eliade'sfantasies, the book is also a moving account of a first love fraughtwith cultural tensions, of false starts and lasting regrets. Proud of her intelligence, Maitreyi Devi's father had provided herwith a fine and, for that time, remarkably liberal education andencouraged his brilliant foreign student, Eliade, to study with her "We were two good exhibits in his museum" Devi writes. They were also, as it turned out, deeply taken with each other. When their secretromance was discovered, Devi's father banished the young Eliade fromtheir home. Against a rich backdrop of life in an upper-caste Hindu household, Devi powerfully recreates the confusion of an over-educated childsimultaneously confronting sex and the differences, not only betweenEuropean and Indian cultures, but also between her mother's and father'sview of what was right. Amid a tangle of misunderstandings, between aEuropean man and an Indian girl, between student and teacher, husbandand wife, father and daughter, she describes a romance unfolding in theface of cultural differences but finally succumbing to culturalconstraints. On its own, It Does Not Die is a fascinating storyof cultural conflict and thwarted love. Read together with Eliade'sBengal Nights, Devi's "romance" is a powerful study of whathappens when the oppositions between innocence and experience, enchantment and disillusion, and cultural difference and
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