MAITREYI’S NOVELS CATOPTRICS
MAITREYI’S NOVELS CATOPTRICS

Summary/Abstract: Very rarely in the history of universal literature, the meeting of two extremely endowed and sensitive young girl and boy, who later became writers, gave rise to a fascinating love story, to be written by both of them. Maitreyi would have remained perhaps only a novel of authenticity, a successful autobiographical novel, narrated in the first singular person, with a consistent tinge of subjectivity if the character in the book had not become Maitreyi Devi, an extremely talented writer who has the gift of translating into writing her perspective on the moment of the years 30s of the 20th century. From an intercultural perspective the love story is a pretext that broadens the reader's horizon of knowledge, but for universal literature it is a unique event in which the miracle of the individual soul clothed by the purity of the thrills of love is the universal soul. Maitreyi Devi (1 September 1914 – 29 January 1989) was the daughter of the philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta (18 October 1887 – 18 December 1952) and Himani Madhuri Devi, sister of Himanshu Rai, director and first film company in India and founder of actress Devika Rani, great-granddaughter of Rabindrana Tagore. Coming from a family of Brahmanic origin that adapted itself to the conditions of the modernization of India and its independence, Maitreyi Devi has the opportunity to find out, after 42 years, about the autobiographical novel whose protagonist she had become and decided to give to literature a masterpiece. The character comes to life and transforms into a writer, turning the author of the novel that has her name into a character. What results is a mirrored, autobiographical, self -referential, postmodern literary creation, which fragments and masterfully overlays the fragments of the times lived, without giving rise to discontinuity, in which the characters multiply as in a catoptric game. The light of love that does not die gives rise to a system of formation of images of characters worthy of Euclid's Pseudo-catoptrics.

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