Felix is an orphan boy who arrives at his uncle’s house in Bucharest to study medicine. Made up twenty chapters, it follows the overlapping lives of different characters: Otilia’s quest for happiness, Felix Sima’s road to success, and the Tulea clan’s pursuit of fortune. 'The novel is highly descriptive, with lengthy and at times convoluted sentences, and there is a preference for neologisms like 'fata juvenila' (juvenile face), 'aspect bizar' (bizarre aspect), and 'barbat chic' (chic man), which accounts for the modernity of the novel.' One of his finest novels, Enigma Otiliei, was published in 1938, and it focuses on the bourgeoisie populating the capital city of Bucharest at the beginning of the 20 th century. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.George Calinescu was a Romanian novelist, critic, historian, academic, and journalist, whose work tends to be humanist and realist.

No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. (English) Copyright of Revista Transilvania is the property of Revista Transilvania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. Finally, I argue that the author employs the narrative device of “prototypical distortion” to lampoon the characters’ deviance. Therefore, I point to the maladaptive psychological traits that the characters exhibit and to how these are projected into the character’ language, forming thus idiosincratic linguistic patterns. Călinescu’s 1938 novel Enigma Otiliei (Otilia’s Riddle) and, in the wake of several literary critics’ shared view that the novel’s characters are individuals driven by much more complex internal mechanisms than simply being based on a single social schema, I suggest that this complexity can be accounted for by the tools provided by psychopathology.

Abstract: Drawing on theoretical developments from cognitive sciences and the literary field, more specifically on concepts such as mind style, literary categorization, and prototypical distortion, in the present article, I set out to explore the relationship between literary characters and psychological deviance.

Enigma Otiliei by George Călinescu