Marriage in Heaven

Written by Mircea Eliade

-Book review-

“Marriage in Heaven” is a love novel written by the Romanian writer Mircea Eliade in
1938. In that time, Mircea Eliade was in prison because of some politically problems. As the
writer says, the book was written in only a month, and with some help from a military general,
Eliade was released and published the book.

“Marriage in Heaven” is a book about the lack of talking between a couple, about the
desperate attempt of a woman to find the spiritual fulfillment. Ileana/Leana is the indirect main
character. The action of the novel starts with two men at a hunting session, talking about their
love-lives and about the woman who left a trace in their lives. The first one to tell is Mavrodin, a
young writer. He talks with the other man, Hasnaș, about his book, by which he apologizes to
the woman he was married for the fact that he couldn’t make her happy. He told his friend how
he meet Ileana, how she was running from the country to forget about another love she had
before, and how their story begun. Mavrodin told him about how he was encouraged by her, and
how he made her give up a child. Afterwards, Ileana disappears and Mavrodin publishes his
book and realizes that he lost the woman. Hasnaș talks about how he meets Leana and how he
recognizes the little girl he has saved in the war time. He tells the other man about how he and
Leana travelled to Itally and how he fell in love with her. For three years of marriage in an
romanian interbelic time, they are known as the perfect couple. Hasnaș, which was a lot older
that Leana, realizes that his life is incomplete and he told Lena that he wants a child. Putting this
desire at the expense of an impetus, Lena refuses. They had a big fight about it and they end up
divorcing. The end of the novel captures the two men who, retrospectively, realize the fact that
they were talking about the same woman. Ileana is Hasnaș’s Leana and Leana is Mavrodin’s
Ileana. Soon afterwards comes the question if the woman is still alive, but knowing how
unhappy she was, they both doubt it.

What makes the novel more fascinating, more than the theme that the author approaches,
is the form by which the subject is transposed. The confessions of the two men take a form of a
lucid story, without excessive subjectivity. The lucid story itself creates a portrait of an
unconsumed true love, of a marriage that couldn’t happen on the Earth but only in Heaven by it’s
mystical desires.

I have read the book from the CARTEX 2000 publishing house, from 2003 Bucharest
edition so my book had 143 pages. Up until the 15th page, my book had a preface written by Dan
C. Mihăilescu. The first headline was “Why is it called ‘Marriage in Heaven’?” and the publisher
answered with a quote from the author:“I finished reading `The Fighting Angel` from Pearl Buck
and the idea of writing a real novel started going through my mind. So I started writing in
September and Nae Ionescu kept asking how the writing was going. I was telling him that I was
dreaming of a love novel that does not look like anything I have been writing until that time, you
know, that kind of love that would have been perfect until the end, unless something mystical
appeared: the dream of making it (the love story) longer, no matter what time and space the
action happened. So the subject was, at first sight, quite simple: two men who randomly met at a
hunting session kept sharing stories about their <true love>. The youngest starts the confession,
Mavrodin, a love-novels writer, because his company asked him what he has written and he told
him that he wrote “Marriage in heaven” a book by which he wanted to apologize Ileana, his true
love, a girl he was and still is in love with. The girl disappeared a year before the book was
published. He told the professor, the hunting partner, what he wanted to do by writing the book,
but without summarizing the action of the story. Of course, it was a love story that happened to
be lived at eight years time-distance, but the tragedy which killed this <perfect love story> was
not caused by something humanly. Actually, the two men have not realized that they were
talking about the same woman, by which both were abandoned. Ileana wanted the mystical
ending and the two men couldn’t made it happen. (…) “And so.. why are you calling it `Marriage
in Heaven?` the professor Nae Ionescu asked. I didn’t known, at that time, how to answer him
properly. “Maybe `Marriage in Heaven` expresses the ambiguity of a whole situation”, that’s
what I should have answered him. Asking Ileana for forgiveness, the novelist of the story, tries,
by that title, to justify his acting: assuming his creator role, the writer was hoping that the
wedding Ileana was dreaming of will eventually happen somewhere, in an transcendent word, in
the skies, in aeternum( `forever` in Latin). Mavrodin first thought that it was about the female
instinct of having a child, but he couldn’t understand why Ileana left her first husband because he
asked her to have a child. It was not the maternity instinct that was involved in the relationship’s
damage, but the wish of having the heavenly marriage. Maybe if Ileana would have known the
title of the novel that Mavrodin was writing, she would have understood it differently: she was
already living the heavenly marriage, that was her perfect love from which nothing was missing.
She (Leana) had already had a messed-up love story from which she was trying to escape and
then she had the chance to be happy and she was too scared to make it happen.”

“Marriage in heaven” is a novel that takes its time until it makes you so curious about the
action. For me, at the beginning, it was a torture to read it, up until the second chapter. I’ve
finished the book in a few hours and I ended up crying. It is, indeed, a novel with a lot of
emotional load and deep meaning and it makes you feel guilty of some actions you never deed.
The historic character adds a lot of drama to the message.

Nițu Ștefania, clasa aXIa H

Colegiul Național „Mihai Eminescu” Suceava

Profesor îndrumător: Hurmuz Elena