Novel
Rakes of the Old Court
Craii de Curtea-Veche
Mateiu Caragiale · 1929
Synopsis
In early twentieth-century Bucharest, a solitary young narrator, keeping apart from the crowd, frequents two men of old stock, Pașadia and Pantazi, and their companion Gore Pirgu, a coarse social climber. The four friends dine, talk of travel, art and history, dream of a nobler past, then roam the city's nights, its banquets and its brothels. Pantazi tells of his life of excess, his fall and his return to comfort through an inheritance. According to The Complete Review, the last chapter takes the narrator to the Arnoteanus, a disorderly house of gamblers and the déclassés.
Context
Sketched as early as 1910 and written in four parts from 1916 to 1927 according to the Romanian Cultural Institute, the novel appeared as a serial in Gândirea from 1926 to 1928, then in book form in 1929. The critics cited by the Institute read in it the portrait of an aristocracy in decline, compare Pantazi to Lampedusa's Prince Salina and warn that each character blends several real models. Its style has been described as lying between Proustian contemplation and fin-de-siècle decadence. Mircea Veroiu made a film of it in 1995. Claude B. Levenson translated it into French in 1969, Sean Cotter into English in 2021.
Who it is for
A short novel in four chapters, in a highly wrought language; readable in French and in English.
Prizes and reception
According to the critic Teodor Vârgolici, cited by this institute, it was from this book that came the literary fame the author had dreamed of.
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