The Use of Man

Tisma’s The Use of Man is a stunning book. I have seldom read anything that authentically conveys the feel of that nightmare-the war, the Holocaust, the brutal aftermath, and the almost equally brutal dreariness of a provincial town frozen in time, caught between Mitteleuropa and the Balkans. The angle of vision-call it compassionate detachment-accounts for some of the impact, but the most impressive achievement is the range of characters. Understated, they all come to life, or to death-in-life, on their own terms. – Ernst Pawel The novel is tough, terse, with episodes that will turn your stomach; yet, because it is written in a style of luminous detachment, it becomes hauntingly poetic and even humorous in its bitter ironies. It is a novel whose power is on a scale normally associated with our favorite (dead) authors. Whether you like what he’s got to say or not, the world will not look quite the same after you’ve read this book. – Toronto Star The remarkable trio [The Use of Man is the first] make up a Balkan bible presided over by an ironic vision of the imagination, capable of envisioning utter barbarity but not the expiation for sins, dwelling on delusions of paranoia rather than traditional community. – Bill Marx, The Boston Globe Aleksandar Tisma may appear to be writing yet another novel dealing with the Second World War devastation of Europe. He is not. It is an amazingly fresh and profoundly wise piece of writing. He brings the reticence of the scalpel to an examination of the nature of violence. He probes with clarity and detachment the secret areas of the human psyche where motives for violence are born. This is a seminal work of post-war fiction, and Bernard Johnson has produced not only an exemplary rendering from Serbo-Croatian, but something of a classic in English. – Branko Gorjup, Ottawa Citizen Man has no noble use in The Use of Man, Aleksandar Tisma’s exceptional novel about the Nazi conquest of Yugoslavia… Mr. Tisma’s deliberate unfolding of his characters’ fates serves to illustrate the novel’s underlying premise: Yugoslavia’s wartime experience-everything from the deportation of the Jews to Tito’s Communism-resulted in his country’s inevitable ruin. That Mr. Tisma manages to convey such large historical ideas without sacrificing the story’s drama attests to his abilities as a gifted and humane writer. – Barbara Finkelstein, The New York Times As [Tisma] probes the complexities and ambiguities of people’s behavior under these terrible circumstances, he is unrelenting in his quest for the truth yet compassionate in his judgments of individuals. – Merle Rubin, The Wall Street Journal A bleak and moving account of the tender lives of the damned. – Kirkus Reviews A masterly evocation of fortitude, resignation, turpitude and sheer bloody-minded self-preservation in the face of fear, violent repression, and leaden-jawed dogma. – The Times (London) This novel is written with an undeluded toughness of spirit, the spirit of a European who has seen just about everything there is to see and doesn’t blink or evade. The prose is firm and the structure is tight. Tisma maintains a consistent tone of austere detachment, yet one ends with a great deal of pity for his characters. Reading the novel, I felt I was privileged to meet a distinguished European writer. – Irving Howe

Aleksandar Tisma (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 Tisma received a good education. In 1941, Hungary annexed Vojvodina; the next year-Tisma’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 Tismas were spared. After fighting for the Yugoslav partisans, Tisma 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. Tisma published his first story, “Ibika’s House,” in 1951; it was followed by the novels Guilt and In 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. Tisma 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.

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