{"product_id":"the-use-of-man-isbn-9781590177266","title":"The Use of Man","description":"\u003ci\u003eThe Use of Man \u003c\/i\u003estarts 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 \u003ci\u003ePoésie\u003c\/i\u003e. . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA work of stark poetry and illimitable sadness, \u003ci\u003eThe Use of Man\u003c\/i\u003e is one of the great books of the 20th century.“Aleksandar Tišma 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, \u003ci\u003eOttawa Citizen\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Tišma’s \u003ci\u003eThe Use of Man\u003c\/i\u003e 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\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “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.” —\u003ci\u003eToronto Star\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “The remarkable trio [\u003ci\u003eThe Use of Man\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Man has no noble use in \u003ci\u003eThe Use of Man\u003c\/i\u003e, Aleksandar Tišma’s exceptional novel about the Nazi conquest of Yugoslavia.... Mr. Tišma’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. Tišma 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, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “As [Tišma] 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A bleak and moving account of the tender lives of the damned.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A masterly evocation of fortitude, resignation, turpitude and sheer bloody-minded self-preservation in the face of fear, violent repression, and leaden-jawed dogma.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Times \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “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. Tišma 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\u003cb\u003eAleksandar Tišma\u003c\/b\u003e (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  \u003ci\u003eGuilt\u003c\/i\u003e and I\u003ci\u003en Search of the Dark Girl\u003c\/i\u003e and a collection of stories, \u003ci\u003eViolence\u003c\/i\u003e.  In the 1970s and ’80s, he gained international recognition with the publication of his Novi Sad trilogy: \u003ci\u003eThe Book of Blam \u003c\/i\u003e(1971), about a survivor of the Hungarian occupation of Novi Sad; \u003ci\u003eThe Use of Man \u003c\/i\u003e(1976), which follows a group of friends through the Second World War and after; and \u003ci\u003eKapo\u003c\/i\u003e (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.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBernard Johnson\u003c\/b\u003e (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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eClaire Messud\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of four novels and a book of novellas. Her novel \u003ci\u003eThe Emperor’s Children\u003c\/i\u003e was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and was selected as one of the ten best books of 2006 by \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e. Her most recent novel is \u003ci\u003eThe Woman Upstairs\u003c\/i\u003e. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301355671781,"sku":"NP9781590177266","price":21.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590177266.jpg?v=1767742025","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-use-of-man-isbn-9781590177266","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}