Lorelei
Ionel Teodoreanu
Lorelei
From the window of a first-class compartment the writer Catul Bogdan watches a girl spill a basket of cherries at a small country station. He meets Luli again in Galați, where he chairs the board examining her class for the baccalaureate, and she follows him back to Iași as his wife. Then letters begin to arrive from an unknown admirer who signs herself Lorelei, a woman he can only imagine. Ionel Teodoreanu's lyrical novel of 1935.
Contains spoilers for the entire book
- Themes
- Atmosphere
About the book
Published in 1935, Lorelei follows the writer Catul Bogdan from his first glimpse of Luli at a small country railway station to Galați, where he chairs the board examining her class for the baccalaureate, and on into their marriage in Iași. Its seven parts take their titles from quoted lines, and one whole part belongs to Catul’s friend Nathan Sabbetai. Into the marriage come letters from an unknown woman who admires the writer from a distance and signs herself Lorelei. Ionel Teodoreanu writes in the lush, metaphor-laden prose of La Medeleni, set here in the Moldavian towns of Iași and Galați and by the Danube. The novel places the everyday reality of a marriage beside the pull of an imagined woman, and keeps asking what a writer loves: the person in front of him, or the figure his imagination makes of someone he will never see.
Characters
Catul Bogdan — The writer
A novelist from Iași, a solitary man of fixed habits, who chairs the baccalaureate board at Galați and finds there the girl he first saw at a country station.
Luli — The heroine
Lucica, an only child given to reading, who sits her baccalaureate in Galați and becomes Catul’s wife, known from then on as Doamna Luli.
Gabriela — Luli’s friend
Her school friend and travelling companion, who has called her Luli-boy for years.
Nathan Sabbetai — Catul’s friend
His only close friend, who manages his money and his household, and to whom the fourth part of the novel is given.
Haziaica — The housekeeper
The Armenian woman who keeps Catul Bogdan’s house, loyal to its odd young master.
Lorelei — The unknown correspondent
A woman the writer never sees, who sends him letters of admiration and signs them with the name of the Rhine siren.
About the author
Ionel Teodoreanu (1897–1954) was a Romanian novelist and lawyer from Iași, and one of the most widely read writers of interwar Romania. His prose is lush and lyrical, thick with metaphor, and at its best when it is about childhood — the private kingdom children make out of a house, a garden and a summer. La Medeleni, the trilogy he published between 1925 and 1927, follows Olguța, Dănuț and Monica from those summers on a Moldavian country estate into adolescence and the disappointments that come after it, and it remains one of the best-loved books in Romanian. He was married to the writer Ștefana Velisar Teodoreanu, and his brother Păstorel was a celebrated epigrammatist. After the communist takeover he was pushed to the margins of literary life, and he died in Bucharest in 1954.