{"product_id":"kin-isbn-9781939810526","title":"Kin","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eKin\u003c\/i\u003e is a dazzling family epic from one of Croatia's most prized writers. In this sprawling narrative which spans the entire twentieth century, Miljenko Jergović peers into the dusty corners of his family's past, illuminating them with a tender, poetic precision.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOrdinary, forgotten objects - a grandfather's beekeeping journals, a rusty benzene lighter, an army issued raincoat - become the lenses through which Jergović investigates the joys and sorrows of a family living through a century of war. The work is ultimately an ode to Yugoslavia - Jergović sees his country through the devastation of the First World War, the Second, the Cold, then the Bosnian war of the 90s; through its changing street names and borders, shifting seasons, through its social rituals at graveyards, operas, weddings, markets - rendering it all in loving, vivid detail. A portrait of an era.\"Vast, generous-spirited story of family across the face of the 20th century in the turbulent Balkans . . . There is beauty aplenty, and ample monstrosity, in Jergović’s account, as well as many moments of mystery: a beekeeper’s coded journal, the alpenglow that surrounds Sarajevo as surely as a besieging army, the “living torment” that is existence, all come under Jergović’s empathetic eye. A masterwork of modern European letters that should earn the author a wide readership outside his homeland.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Miljenko Jergović has lived as a “foreigner” in Zagreb since 1993, where, as narrator, he channels stories of Sarajevo and the ways in which the city has embodied the 20th century’s major flash points—religious intolerance, virulent nationalism, and world wars . . . Jergović devotes the first section to quotidian ancestral history, but even here the scope widens with soaring chapters on the geopolitical changes after WWII . . . dozens of shimmering vignettes build to the hallucinatory novella-length capstone “Sarajevo Dogs” . . . [Jergović’s] astonishing project offers endless rewards.\" \u003cbr\u003e--\u003cb\u003ePublishers Weekly (starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A superb English translation . . . \u003ci\u003eKin\u003c\/i\u003e is deeply interested in moments that trickle down through the years, and how, even when languages and the names of countries have changed, when wars have completely reshaped the region, these fleeting seconds have stayed rooted in a family’s mind.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Sarah McEachern, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In [an] excellent translation . . . Jergović mythologizes his family’s history in the manner of Thomas Mann . . . Writing about Sarajevo and its geography, Jergović delivers a nostalgic, angry, and beautiful tribute to his hometown.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Damjana Mraović-O’Hare, \u003ci\u003eWorld Literature Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eKin\u003c\/i\u003e, Miljenko Jergović’s time-travelling, place-hopping epic, is at once a history of family and an ode to Yugoslavia. Spanning the entire 20th century, \u003ci\u003eKin\u003c\/i\u003e traces the palimpsestic layers of the region’s past from the two World Wars through to the turmoil of the 90s. Taking the dusty objects of his family’s past and his own pockmarked memories as the subjects of his enquiry, the book is as much a comment on memory’s elusive surface as it is a social history of the region.\" \u003cbr\u003e--\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eCalvert Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\" [Jergovic is] a poet, novelist, and journalist of the highest caliber...His concern is for the living and in this collection of stories about Sarajevo and its inhabitants he writes about them with the seriousness, sensitivity, quirky intelligence, and gentle humor of a master of the short story.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e-- \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Jergovic has the mien of the rare author whose gift is so innate he need only conquer a few demons and steady his hands enough to write it all down.\" \u003cbr\u003e--\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eSan Diego Union Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\" From baking to beekeeping, from Satan to citizenship, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to war, famine, and poverty, Jergović covers the gamut of a hundred year period, a variety of languages, nationalities, religions, historical events and famous and ordinary people . . . Fact or invented, this is a superb family novel.\" \u003cbr\u003e--\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Modern Novel\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"Jergović is neither naïve nor sentimental about the uses of storytelling . . . In a land marked by death and disappearances, storytelling saves the murdered from oblivion . . . In a region scarred by ethnic conflict, of missing persons and forgotten graves, the simple domestic act of remembrance can transform into a more powerful statement against the politics of hatred and annihilation. It is in the everyday that Jergović hopes to find salvation enough for the entire world.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Duncan Stuart\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"...a multilayered and complex text, which demonstrates why Jergović is one of the most prominent Croatian authors and one of the most translated European writers.\" \u003cbr\u003e--\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eWorld Literature Today\u003c\/i\u003e on \u003ci\u003eMama Leone\u003c\/i\u003e, a winner of Italy's 2003 Premio Grinzane Cavour for Best Book in Translation\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Charting the complexities of the past hundred years as endured by just one family ... \u003ci\u003eKin\u003c\/i\u003e illustrates how consequences ripple across the generations and along chains of kinship, whether those ripples [are] formed by actions within the family or imposed upon it by social conditions of the time. . . . Translator Russell Scott Valentino . . . gracefully performed an enormous job.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e--Tom Bowden, \u003ci\u003eBook Beat\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"Kin\u003c\/i\u003e is an intimate and painstakingly detailed attempt to comprehend one’s own identity . . . Jergovic delivers a nostalgic, irate, touching, and, above everything, beautiful homage to Sarajevo and its geography.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e--Damjana Mraovic-O’Hare, \u003ci\u003eTransitions\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eNovelist,  short story writer, poet, and columnist, Miljenko Jergovic is a  literary phenomenon whose writing is celebrated throughout Europe. His  poetry collection \u003ci\u003eWarsaw Observatory\u003c\/i\u003e received the Goran Prize for young poets and the Mak Dizdar Award and his landmark collection of stories \u003ci\u003eSarajevo Marlboro\u003c\/i\u003e received the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize. \u003ci\u003eMama Leone\u003c\/i\u003e won the highly regarded Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign book in Italy in 2003. His other works include \u003ci\u003eRuta Tannenbaum, The Walnut House, Buick Riviera,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eFather\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRussell  Scott Valentino is an  American author, literary scholar, and  translator. He has translated  works from Italian, Croatian, and Russian,  and his essays, poetry, and  translated fiction have appeared in  journals such as The \u003ci\u003eIowa Review, Two Lines, POROI, Circumference\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003e91st Meridian\u003c\/i\u003e.   He is the recipient of NEA Literature Fellowships for translation in   prose (2002 \u0026amp; 2016) and poetry (2010) and he received a PEN\/Heim   award in 2016. He currently teaches Slavic and Comparative Literature at   Indiana University.Where Other People Live: A Presentation\u003cbr\u003e My father and two uncles went to the same high school in Sarajevo that I did.\u003cbr\u003e Despite the nearly fifty years that had passed since my elder uncle was enrolled in\u003cbr\u003e the school – back in 1934 – the interior had remained the same. The person who\u003cbr\u003e noticed this was my grandmother, who came to the parent-teacher conferences\u003cbr\u003e for both him and me. My father and younger uncle were taught by the same art\u003cbr\u003e history professor, whom I would eventually have as well. When the old professor\u003cbr\u003e died at the beginning of my second year, all three of us attended his funeral.\u003cbr\u003e From its founding in the 1880s it had been an elite school for the bourgeoisie.\u003cbr\u003e The Bosnian author and Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić graduated from it, after considerable\u003cbr\u003e torment, about which he would later speak with horror and disgust.\u003cbr\u003e This is probably why his name was never mentioned at school functions, when\u003cbr\u003e the director would enumerate all the distinguished personages and celebrities\u003cbr\u003e who had attended the school. In my own days communist revolutionaries were\u003cbr\u003e considered the most noteworthy graduates, in addition to the assassins of Franz\u003cbr\u003e Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Gavrilo Princip himself,\u003cbr\u003e who fired the shots that struck Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, did not graduate\u003cbr\u003e from the school, because he had moved to Belgrade by then, but several of his\u003cbr\u003e close associates did.\u003cbr\u003e Our professors often told us that we must model ourselves after these figures\u003cbr\u003e – we lived in a socialist society, after all, which held especially fast to its bright and\u003cbr\u003e shining examples. Among them our parents and uncles were often held up to us\u003cbr\u003e as paragons of sacrifice and heroism.\u003cbr\u003e Around the subject of my elder uncle there was silence. He never received\u003cbr\u003e any grade lower than the very highest. He had pen pals in other countries with\u003cbr\u003e whom he corresponded in Latin, he solved unsolvable math problems, he played\u003cbr\u003e the guitar, and he wrote an essay on Paul Valéry. In photographs, tall and fragile,\u003cbr\u003e with his blond hair and blue eyes, he looks like a young aristocrat in a Thomas\u003cbr\u003e Mann novel, someone who will die by the end of the book, from meningitis or\u003cbr\u003e gaping caverns in his lungs, but his will not be an ordinary, quotidian death for in\u003cbr\u003e it will be gathered the destiny of a family or even that of an entire generation. I\u003cbr\u003e should say that while this is how my elder uncle looked, nothing else about him\u003cbr\u003e was like in Mann, except that I’d have been happy to reproduce on his gravestone\u003cbr\u003e the words with which the doctor of philosophy Serenus Zeitblom takes leave of\u003cbr\u003e his own friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn: “May God have pity on your\u003cbr\u003e poor soul, my friend, my homeland.”\u003cbr\u003e But I’m not at all certain what my uncle’s homeland would have been. What’s\u003cbr\u003e clearer, at any rate, is that I don’t have one, which means in the end that I wouldn’t\u003cbr\u003e really know what such an epitaph on his hypothetical grave would even mean.\u003cbr\u003e He was born in Usora, a small town in central Bosnia, where his father, my\u003cbr\u003e grandfather, was employed as a railroad stationmaster. He grew up along the\u003cbr\u003e tracks built by the Austro-Hungarians, changing homes and friends often. From\u003cbr\u003e his father he learned Slovenian, while his mother tongue was Croatian, but his first\u003cbr\u003e language was German. This he learned from his grandfather, my great-grandfather,\u003cbr\u003e a high-ranking railroad official, a Swabian German from Banat, who was\u003cbr\u003e born in a town that’s now in Romania and went to schools in Vršac, Budapest,\u003cbr\u003e and Vienna. He too spent all his working life along the tracks of Bosnia.\u003cbr\u003e You must understand, then, that my elder uncle – let’s call him Mladen\u003cbr\u003e because things will get too confused if we keep this up without names – lived\u003cbr\u003e in complex surroundings and a complicated linguistic web. It is possible for language\u003cbr\u003e to determine a person’s destiny. Mladen’s grandfather Karlo was a nationally\u003cbr\u003e minded German, and he spoke only German to all four of his children until\u003cbr\u003e he died. Not once did he ever speak to them even a single Croatian word. With\u003cbr\u003e his daughters’ husbands – two Croats and a Slovene – he spoke Croatian, despite\u003cbr\u003e the fact that all three of them spoke perfect German. With his grandchildren he\u003cbr\u003e spoke both languages, but only after he had been addressed in German. If anyone\u003cbr\u003e greeted him in Croatian, Opapa pretended not to hear.\u003cbr\u003e They say the weekly meals at which the whole family would gather were quite\u003cbr\u003e something. There was a strict language protocol of the sort that today probably\u003cbr\u003e only exists at the headquarters of the European Union, though no one seems\u003cbr\u003e to have wondered why it had to be that way. Karlo’s Germanness was especially\u003cbr\u003e important to him, everyone else around him would have to adapt. In return, no\u003cbr\u003e one, least of all he, prevented them from being something other than who they\u003cbr\u003e were or from speaking whatever languages they pleased. My great grandfather\u003cbr\u003e loved his sons-in-law, and it didn’t bother him that they weren’t German; rather,\u003cbr\u003e he was proud, I should note, of their civic calling. Belonging to the railroad workers’\u003cbr\u003e trade was for him something like being in a secret society, a Masonic lodge\u003cbr\u003e of sorts, whose members differed from other people by their understanding of\u003cbr\u003e the world and their own role within it. A German rail man and a Croatian rail\u003cbr\u003e man enjoy a brotherhood that allowed them greater mutual understanding than\u003cbr\u003e any members of a single nation among themselves. Opapa was a leftist, and in\u003cbr\u003e the early 1920s he ended up in prison and later lost his job for backing a rail men’s\u003cbr\u003e strike. It wouldn’t have been a scandal if he had not been a stationmaster and\u003cbr\u003e a German among the barbarous Slavs. He was harshly punished by the royal\u003cbr\u003e government for the betrayal of his caste and his nation.\u003cbr\u003e But at home we were raised with the belief that all people have the same\u003cbr\u003e rights, regardless of their faith or economic status. The poor little country of\u003cbr\u003e Bosnia, where nearly 90 percent of the people in the 1920s and ’30s were illiterate,\u003cbr\u003e where epidemics of typhus and cholera would take over with alarming\u003cbr\u003e frequency, and where an endemic syphilis ravaged generation upon generation\u003cbr\u003e without respite, like some kind of evil tradition, this Bosnia was – for Opapa\u003cbr\u003e Karlo and his ideas – the ideal place to be living. He never had any notion of\u003cbr\u003e returning to the Banat or of moving to Vienna or Germany. Those were foreign\u003cbr\u003e countries to him. When asked about it, he would quietly answer that he wouldn’t\u003cbr\u003e ever be able to live in those places because that was “where other people lived.”\u003cbr\u003e As far as I’m concerned, there’s never been a more precise definition for the opposite\u003cbr\u003e of one’s homeland.\u003cbr\u003e Uncle Mladen was more like his grandfather than the other grandchildren\u003cbr\u003e were, even though one wouldn’t have said he resembled him physically. The\u003cbr\u003e elderly Karlo had dark hair and a long gray beard; judging by his photographs,\u003cbr\u003e he looked more like a Romanian rabbi, or at least a learned Jewish man, than\u003cbr\u003e a German. But Mladen, with his Nordic blue eyes and his bearing, took after\u003cbr\u003e the Slovene peasants of his father’s side. When I look at the two of them in the\u003cbr\u003e faded black-and-white photos, I wonder what their lives might have been like if\u003cbr\u003e German had not come so easily to Mladen, if he hadn’t so willingly listened to\u003cbr\u003e his grandfather play the violin, if he had been seated farther from the old man\u003cbr\u003e during the Sunday meals. I wonder what might have been if the old man had\u003cbr\u003e hated the Slav in his grandson even a little bit.","brand":"Archipelago","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300294152421,"sku":"NP9781939810526","price":38.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781939810526.jpg?v=1767730734","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/kin-isbn-9781939810526","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}