Editing Mircea Eliade (section)

==== ''Isabel și apele diavolului'' ====
One of Eliade's earliest fiction writings, the controversial [[first-person narrative]] '''''Isabel şi apele diavolului''''' ('Isabel and the Devil's Waters'), focused on the figure of a young and brilliant academic, whose self-declared fear is that of "being common".<ref name="Eliade Căl. p.956">Eliade, in Călinescu, p. 956</ref> The hero's experience is recorded in "notebooks", which are compiled to form the actual narrative, and which serve to record his unusual, mostly sexual, experiences in [[British India]]—the narrator describes himself as dominated by "a devilish indifference" towards "all things having to do with art or [[metaphysics]]", focusing instead on eroticism.<ref name="Eliade Căl. p.956" /> The guest of a pastor, the scholar ponders sexual adventures with his host's wife, servant girl, and finally with his daughter Isabel. Persuading the pastor's adolescent son to run away from home, becoming the sexual initiator of a twelve-year-old girl and the lover of a much older woman, the character also attempts to seduce Isabel. Although she falls in love, the young woman does not give in to his pressures, but eventually allows herself to be abused and impregnated by another character, letting the object of her affection know that she had thought of him all along.<ref name="Căl. p.957">Călinescu, p. 957</ref>