Novel
Enigma Otiliei
Not translated into English
George Călinescu · 1938
Synopsis
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Felix Sima, an orphan from Iași, arrives in Bucharest, on Antim Street, at the home of his guardian Costache Giurgiuveanu, to study medicine. The old miser manages the young man's inheritance and is reluctant to loosen his purse strings. Felix falls in love with Otilia, the daughter of Costache's late second wife, whom he never adopted, and who is linked to Leonida Pascalopol, a rich friend of the old man, by a relationship that the novel leaves ambiguous. The Tulea clan prowls around them, led by Aglae, who is waiting for the inheritance, together with her son-in-law Stănică Rațiu, a cunning lawyer.
Context
The novel appeared in 1938, at first under the title Les Parents d'Otilia according to The Modern Novel, which stresses its debt to Balzac, its comic tone and its teeming plot, over more than six hundred pages. The reading sheet of the Lumina library places it in Balzacian objective realism and sees in it a fresco of the Bucharest bourgeoisie, led by an omniscient narrator. Aurel George Boeșteanu translated it into French around 1960, for La Nef de Paris; the book also appeared in German, Spanish and Czech.
Who it is for
A long novel of manners in the manner of Balzac, in Romanian; readable in French in an old translation, with no English version.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's best novel; The Modern Novel regards it as one of the very first Romanian novels in terms of merit.
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