Synopses & Reviews
Aleksandar Tišma (1924–2003) was born in the Vojvodina, a former province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had been incorporated into the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the First World War. His father, a Serb, came from a peasant background; his mother was middle-class and Jewish. The family lived comfortably, and Tišma received a good education. In 1941, Hungary annexed Vojvodina; the next year—Tišma’s last in high school—the regime carried out a series of murderous pogroms, killing some 3,000 inhabitants, primarily Serbs and Jews, though the Tišmas were spared. After fighting for the Yugoslav partisans, Tišma studied philosophy at Belgrade University and went into journalism and in 1949 joined the editorial staff of a publishing house, where he remained until his retirement in 1980. Tišma published his first story, “Ibika’s House,” in 1951; it was followed by the novels
Guilt and I
n Search of the Dark Girl and a collection of stories,
Violence. In the 1970s and ’80s, he gained international recognition with the publication of his Novi Sad trilogy:
The Book of Blam (1971), about a survivor of the Hungarian occupation of Novi Sad;
The Use of Man (1976), which follows a group of friends through the Second World War and after; and
Kapo (1987), the story of a Jew raised as a Catholic who becomes a guard in a German concentration camp. Tišma moved to France after the outbreak of war and collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but in 1995 he returned to Novi Sad, where he spent his last years.
Bernard Johnson (1933–2003) was affiliated with the Language Centre at the London School of Economics for many years. In 1970 he edited and translated the first anthology of modern Yugoslav literature, and throughout his career he distinguished himself as one of the most active translators of Serbo-Croatian poetry and prose working in English.
Claire Messud is the author of four novels and a book of novellas. Her novel The Emperor’s Children was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and was selected as one of the ten best books of 2006 by The New York Times. Her most recent novel is The Woman Upstairs. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Synopsis
Aleksandar Tišma (1923–2003) was a Serbian novelist, short-story writer, journalist, editor, translator, and poet. Having grown up in Novi Sad, Serbia, in 1944, he returned there from Budapest to join Tito’s partisan forces. Following the end of World War II he worked as a journalist for more than a decade before publishing his first literary work, the collection of poems
Naseljeni svet (The Populated World) in 1956, followed by more poetry, stories, a play, critical essays, and novels. In 1976 he gained new prominence with the release of his major novel,
The Use of Man; among the many recognitions he would subsequently receive are the NIN, NOLIT, and Ivo Andrić awards. Between 1992 and 1995 Tišma went into political exile in France. Other titles of his available in English translation are
The Book of Blam and
Kapo.
Claire Messud’s most recent novel, The Woman Upstairs, was published in April 2013.
Bernard Johnson (1933–2003) was a British scholar who served as the director of the Language Centre at the London School of Economics. He was the editor and co-translator of the first book-length collection of modern Yugoslav literature in 1970. Among the many other works he has translated from the Serbo-Croatian are The Houses of Belgrade by Borislav Pekić, Links/Karike and The Slavs Beneath Parnassus: Selected Poems by Miodrag Pavlovic, and Black Apples: Selected Poems, 1954–1987 by Slavko Mihalic.
Synopsis
Aleksandar Tišma’s
The Use of Man is an unsparing and unequaled reckoning with the destruction of human life, self, and being in war, a book about a particular time and place, World War II and the Balkans, but nonetheless for all times. Set on the banks in the multiethnic town of Novi Sad on the Yugoslavian border with Hungary, the novel tracks the intertwined lives of a group of young people, high-school classmates, accustomed to studying and dancing and flirting and gossiping with one another. Then war breaks out, changing everything. Vera, of German background and half Jewish, is sent to a concentration camp; her cousin Sep becomes a Nazi; her boyfriend Milinko, a Serb, joins the resistance. Another friend, Svedoje, triumphs over the mayhem by becoming a killer, pure and simple. And when Vera returns after the war to what remains of the place called home she finds that survival, too, has its dead ends.
Tišma is one of the master writers of the twentieth century, a companion to Vasily Grossman, Curzio Malaparte, and László Krasznahorkai. Writing about the savagery that erupts in war but also about the persistent terror that underlies peace, Tišma, more than any of his peers, speaks directly to the unspeakable cruelty of life. He does so, however, with a composure, with a respect for the singularity of human character and existence, and with bleak beauty that makes his work not only unignorable but essential. The scrupulous archaeologist of the destroyed soul, he restores its fragments to our contemplation with such art and care that we cannot turn aside.
About the Author
The Use of Man starts with an unexpected discovery. World War II is ending. Sredoje Lazukić has been fighting all through it. Now, as one of the victorious Partisans, he has come home to Novi Sad. He visits the house he grew up in. Strangers nervously show him around. He looks up the mother of Milinko, his best friend. Milinko’s girlfriend, Vera, was the daughter of a Jew, a bookish businessman. Her house stands empty and open. Venturing in, Sredoje is surprised to find the diary of the German tutor that Milinko, Vera, and he all shared, Fräulein, who died on the operating table just before the war. Here, however, in a cheap notebook in Vera’s old room, is a record of Fräulein’s lonely days, with the sentimental caption
Poésie. . . .
The diary survived. Sredoje survived. Vera and Milinko have survived too. But what survives? A few years back Sredoje, Vera, and Milinko were teenagers, struggling to make sense of life. Life, they now know, can be more bitter than death.
A work of stark poetry and illimitable sadness, The Use of Man is one of the great books of the 20th century.