The Use Of Man

Aleksander Tisma

ISBN 10: 1590177266 / ISBN 13: 9781590177266

Published by New York Review Books Nov 2014, 2014

About this Item

Neuware -The Use of Man starts with an unexpected discovery. World War II is ending. Sredoje Lazukic 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. 368 pp. Englisch.

Seller Inventory # 9781590177266

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Use Of Man
• Publisher: New York Review Books Nov 2014
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590177266
• ISBN 13: 9781590177266
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 203W x 130H x 22D millimeters 203 millimeters width by 130 millimeters height by 22 millimeters depth
• Weight: 356 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Aleksandar Ti ma 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.<br />Ti ma 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, Ti ma, 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 make 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

ALEKSANDAR TISMA (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 Andri awards. Between 1992 and 1995 Ti ma went into political exile in France. Other titles of his available in English translation are The Book of Blam and Kapo.

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 Peki , Links/Karike and The Slavs Beneath Parnassus: Selected Poems by Miodrag Pavlovic, and Black Apples: Selected Poems, 1954 1987 by Slavko Mihalic.

CLAIRE MESSUD s most recent novel, The Woman Upstairs, was published in April 2013.

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