Book Review – Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović (translated by Bogdan Rakić and Stephen M. Dickey)

‘Death and the Dervish‘ by Meša Selimović was recommended to me by multiple friends and I finally got to read it.

Ahmed Nuruddin is a dervish in a monastery. He has left his normal life in his village and has embraced a spiritual life. One day he discovers that his brother has been put in prison because he has seen a document that he is not supposed to see. While Ahmed the dervish is wondering what he should do about it, he discovers a fugitive who is running away from the law, who tries to hide within his monastery. Our dervish feels that he is in a delicate situation. He doesn’t want to help the fugitive hide as it will be against the law and it will come back to bite him. He also doesn’t want to help the law catch the fugitive, because then he’ll be racked by guilt. So while our dervish ponders on his moral choices and discovers how morally indecisive and weak he is, events take a life of their own and they move in an unexpected direction. What happens to the dervish and his brother and the fugitive and other people form the rest of the story.

The book can be divided into two clear parts. The first part is low on plot and high on beautiful contemplative passages and insights and philosophy. The second part is high on events and plot and low on philosophy. I loved the first part more. It was like reading Dostoevsky. There were so many beautiful, contemplative passages in the first part and I couldn’t stop highlighting them. Even when the main character goes to meet someone and has a conversation, there is a contemplative passage there rather than a dialogue. The second part of the book moves the events at a rapid pace (rapid when compared to the first part). There is a huge surprise and revelation at the beginning of the second part that I didn’t see coming. I want to go back and check the first part and see whether the narrator has given any clues to it.

The whole story for me, was a beautiful study in faintheartedness and moral indecisiveness and moral cowardice. It made me think a lot. There is an introduction at the beginning of the book by Henry R. Cooper Jr., in which he has described it much better. That introduction is beautiful and insightful and tells us more about Meša Selimović and his most famous book and puts it in the literary and the historical context.

There are only two books by Meša Selimović which are available in English translation, this one, and its sequel ‘The Fortress‘. They are both not easily available, and ‘The Fortress’ is available only as a regular book. No digital edition there. They are both published by Northwestern University Press. I don’t know why the English translations are guarded like an ancient flame and are prevented from reaching a wider audience. This is the case with most classic Balkan writers – Ivo Andrić, Miroslav Krleža, Danilo Kiš, Irena Vrkljan, Vesna Parun, and now Meša Selimović. I don’t know what secrets the guardians of the flame are exactly guarding here. Why not make these wonderful writers accessible to a larger audience so that more readers can read and enjoy their work and sing their praises? Why, why, why? The world wants to know.

I know that I shouldn’t meddle in affairs that I don’t know anything about and in recent times I did exactly that and I wrote about something and it came back to bite me. But I feel the itch now and it is hard not to scratch and so I’m going to do it again – write about something that is none of my business. So, there is this fascinating passage in the introduction to Selimović’s book. It goes like this.

“In his autobiography, Sjećanja (Memoirs), and his other public pronouncements toward the end of his life Selimović developed with increasing insistence the idea that he was a Serb by nationality, a Bosnian merely by birth. Such self-identification was no idle semantic game in Yugoslavia, as has become painfully clear in the aftermath of that country’s breakup. Notwithstanding the claims of the nationalists, the difference among Serbs, Croats, and Slavic Muslims is neither linguistic, nor ethnic, nor, as religious practice fades, confessional. The essential difference derives from a sense of community: Which set of national myths will an individual choose to celebrate as his or her own? Which group of people will he or she celebrate them with? Despite contemporary appearances, movement among these groups has been appreciable over time, and the boundaries until recently have remained porous. How else could Ivo Andrić, born of Croatian parents, baptized a Roman Catholic, raised and educated in Bosnia, be hailed at his death as Serbia’s greatest writer? How else could Selimović, so closely identified with the Bosnian Muslim milieu, expect acceptance as a Serb? Many have speculated on the motivations underlying both Andrić’s and Selimovic’s adoption of Serbian cultural citizenship, and the unkindest have often posited mean self-interest. In both cases, however, it seems clear that the writers saw Serbdom’s tent to be larger, more inclusive, more varied and inviting than the far smaller tents into which they had been born. In the context of the Slavic-speaking Balkans, the Serbs had the most cosmopolitan culture; the rest were more provincial and (consider the Croatian laureate Miroslav Krleža) even stifling. One way or another, Selimović insisted on his Serbian identity at a time when it was not particularly fashionable (or even politically astute) to do so. Whatever his motive, it seemed particularly important to him to join the ranks of Serbian writers, and to understand his Bosnian Muslim ways as a subset of the larger Serbian cultural heritage.”

It is interesting that Selimović who was born Bosnian, considered himself Serbian at the end of his life. I don’t know why he did that. Today, he is probably celebrated as a great Serbian writer in Serbia and as a great Bosnian writer in Bosnia. I don’t know what he’d say about that if he was around.

Henry Cooper’s observation – “In the context of the Slavic-speaking Balkans, the Serbs had the most cosmopolitan culture; the rest were more provincial and (consider the Croatian laureate Miroslav Krleža) even stifling” – I don’t know whether this was true then in the 1960s. (Did he really call Miroslav Krleža provincial? Really???) It is definitely not true now. No one will call Croatian literature provincial today. Most readers who know anything about the contemporary literature of the region will laugh at that statement. Even an amateur reader like me will.

Well, that is enough controversy for today. I enjoyed reading ‘Death and the Dervish’. The first part was brilliant. I’m glad that after procrastinating for a long time, I finally got around to reading it.

I’m sharing below some of my favourite passages from the book. Hope you like them.

“Although we lived together, we knew little about one another, since we never talked about ourselves, never openly. We only talked about what we had in common. And that was good. Personal matters were too subtle, murky, and vain; we were to keep them to ourselves if we could not suppress them entirely. Our conversations were largely reduced to general, familiar phrases that others had used before us, phrases that were tried and safe, because they protected us from surprises and misunderstandings. A personal tone is poetry, an opportunity for distortion, or arbitrariness, and to leave the realm of general thought is to doubt it. Therefore, we knew each other only according to what was unimportant, or what was identical in each of us. In other words, we did not know each other at all; nor was that necessary. To know each other meant to know what we should not.”

“Later I watched Mullah-Yusuf copy the Koran, outside, in front of the tekke, in the dense shade of a branchy apple tree; he needed even light, without flashes or shadows. I observed his full, rosy hand as it drew in the complex curves of the letters, an endless row of lines across which the eyes of others would roam without even thinking of how long that difficult task had taken, or maybe without even noticing its beauty. I had been surprised the first time I saw this young man’s inimitable skill, but after so long I still marveled at it. The refined curves, ornate loops, the balanced wave of lines, the red and gold beginnings of the verses, the floral designs in the margins—everything was transformed into a beauty that perplexed the beholder, that was even slightly sinful, as it was not a means, but an end into itself, important in and of itself, a dazzling play of colors and forms that diverted attention from what it was supposed to serve. It was even somewhat shameful, as if from those ornamented pages a sensuality emerged, maybe because beauty is in and of itself sensual and sinful, or maybe because I did not see things as I should have.”

“Discontent is like a wild animal, powerless at birth, terrible when it grows stronger.”

“It is hopeless to try to stay pure and free; someone close to you will always make your life miserable.”

“Before, he had talked well, slowly, he had had time for everything, arranging words into harmoniously composed sentences. There had been a certain peace and confidence in his soft, unhurried manner of speaking; it seemed that he was above all things and that he was in control of them. He had believed in the sound and meaning of words. And now this feeble gesture with his hand meant surrender in the face of life, an abandonment of words, which could neither prevent nor explain his misfortune. He shut himself up with this gesture, and hid his confusion before his son, with whom he no longer knew how to speak.”

“I breathed in the fresh May night; it was young and effervescent. I love spring, I thought, I love springtime, it is unwearied and unburdened, it wakes us with a cheerful, lighthearted call to begin anew. It is the deception and hope of each new year; new buds sprout on old trees. I love springtime, I shouted inside myself stubbornly. I forced myself to believe in it; for many years I had hidden springtime from myself, but now I was calling it, offering myself unto it. I touched the blossoms and smooth, new branches of an apple tree at the side of the path; sap rushed in its countless veins. I felt their pulsing, I wished that it would enter me through my fingertips, so that apple blossoms might sprout from my fingers and translucent green leaves from my palms, so that I would become the tender scent of fruit, its silent carelessness. I would carry my blossoming hands before my astonished eyes and extend them to the nourishing rain. I would be rooted in the ground, fed by the sky, renewed by the spring, laid to rest by autumn. How good it would be to begin everything anew. But there could be no new beginning, nor would one be important. We are not aware when new beginnings arrive; we only discover them later when they have already engulfed us, when everything merely continues. Then we believe that everything could have been different, but it could not have, and so we rush into springtime, so as not to think about nonexistent beginnings or unpleasant continuations.”

“Space is our prison, I said, listening to the echoes of my unfamiliar thoughts, thus bringing an unexpected verve into that dead and unnecessary conversation. Space owns us. We own it only as much as our eyes can pass over it. And it wearies us, scares us, challenges us, pursues us. We think that it sees us, but we don’t matter to it; we say that we’ve overcome it, but we only make use of its indifference. The earth isn’t friendly to us; lightning and the waves of the sea aren’t here for us; rather, we exist in them. Man has no true home, he can only wrest one away from those blind powers. And the earth is a foreign domain; it could be a dwelling only for any monsters that might be able to come to grips with its abundant plights. Or else it’s no one’s. Certainly not ours. We haven’t conquered the earth, but only a clod to put our feet on; we haven’t conquered mountains, but only their image in our eyes; we haven’t conquered the sea, but only its resilient firmness and the reflection of its surface. Nothing is ours but illusion, and therefore we hold onto it firmly. We’re not something in the world, but nothing in it; we’re not equal to what’s around us, but different, incompatible with it. In his development, man should strive for the loss of his self-consciousness. The earth is uninhabitable, like the moon, and we only delude ourselves thinking that it’s our true home, since we have no other place to go. The earth is good for those who are irrational or invulnerable. Maybe mankind will find a way out by going back, by becoming sheer strength.”

“My father is strange, he said, if that needs to be said at all, since everyone is strange except colorless and faceless people, who again are strange since they have nothing of their own. In other words, their character is precisely their lack of character. Except every one of us, of course, because we grow so accustomed to ourselves that everything that’s different from us seems strange, so it could be said that whatever is not us is strange. So my father is strange because he thinks that I’m strange, and the other way around, and so on and so forth. There’s no end to our strangeness, and maybe we should consider that in itself strange.”

“I opened the book, picking a passage at random, and came across a tale about Alexander the Great. The emperor, as the story went, received as a gift some wondrous glass dishes. He liked the gifts very much, but smashed them all nonetheless. “Why? Are they not beautiful?” he was asked. “Precisely because of that,” he answered. “They are so beautiful that it would be hard for me to lose them. And with time they would break, one by one. And I would be sorrier than I am now.” The tale was naive but it still astonished me. Its lesson was bitter: one should renounce everything he might ever begin to love, because loss and disappointment are inevitable. We must renounce love in order not to lose it. We must destroy our love so that it will not be destroyed by others. We must renounce every attachment, because of the possibility of regret. This thought is cruelly hopeless. We cannot destroy everything we love; there will always be the possibility that others will destroy it for us.”

“Everyone should be ordered to travel from time to time,” he said, getting fired up. “Or even more: no one should be allowed to stop in one place any longer than necessary. A man isn’t a tree, and being settled in one place is his misfortune. It saps his courage, breaks his confidence. When a man settles down somewhere, he agrees to any and all of its conditions, even the disagreeable ones, and frightens himself with the uncertainty that awaits him. Change to him seems like abandonment, like a loss of an investment: someone else will occupy his domain, and he’ll have to begin again. Digging oneself in marks the real beginning of old age, because a man is young as long as he isn’t afraid to make new beginnings. If he stays in the same place, he has to put up with things, or take action. If he moves on, he keeps his freedom; he’s ready to change places and the conditions imposed on him. How can he leave, and for where? Don’t smile, I know we don’t have anywhere to go. But we can leave sometimes, creating the illusion of freedom. We pretend to leave, and pretend to change. But we come back again, calmed, consoled by the deception.”

Have you read ‘Death and the Dervish’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Checkpoint by David Albahari (Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać)

I discovered David Albahari through a friend’s recommendation, and decided to read his most recent book ‘Checkpoint‘.

A unit of soldiers and their commander are taken to a place in the middle of nowhere and are asked to create a checkpoint and manage it. They don’t know anything about the war going on, and who is the enemy. Nothing happens at the checkpoint. There is no one coming from either side and the days just pass by. As the narrator says –

“So we guarded a checkpoint where nobody was checked and peered through our binoculars at landscapes through which no one passed. If there was a war still on somewhere, we knew nothing about it. No shots were fired, there was no zinging of bullets, no bomb blasts, no helicopter clatter, nothing.”

What happens after that – are the soldiers just ‘waiting for Godot’, or does war enter this quiet place and does something happen – this is told in the rest of the story.

‘Checkpoint’ is a darkly comic satire. It is about the meaningless nature of war, during which innocent people get killed, and nothing good happens. David Albahari has been compared to Kubrick and Kafka and we can see why. (I’ll also add Joseph Heller to the mix.) Albahari’s dark humour makes us laugh in many places, and it also makes us think.

I enjoyed reading ‘Checkpoint’. David Albahari has written many books, but only a few are easily available in English translation. I found that a couple of them are available, and I hope to read them soon.

I’ll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

“No one wanted to die. Even for such a noble cause as defending the homeland. What could possibly be noble about a violent death? And the stupidest part of all was that afterwards this would become fodder for people who’d had no experience at all with it, with death. How can a living person understand someone who’s dead, understand what a gunshot victim thinks as the bullet rips through his flesh…”

“A wiseguy would say that the real barriers are the ones within us, and that the external ones, like the checkpoint, are, in fact, futile. Mumonkan, an ancient collection of Zen tales, speaks of all this with eloquence, but no one among us soldiers had Buddhist texts in mind, especially none of the amateur soldiers, society’s dregs, who were generally blasé about warfare. Professional soldiers, like samurai, are another story, and among them one may find connoisseurs of the Mumonkan and Hagakure, even lovers of the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the music of Edvard Grieg. Yes, it is one thing to be a samurai and altogether different to be an ordinary recruit who, when he opens his eyes in the morning, cares not a whit for himself or for the world.”

“War is so unnatural, so different from all else, that no one in their right mind can grasp why war would be a part of human culture. The commander turned—he ought to love war at least a little, being a man in uniform, but he couldn’t bring himself to. Never would he admit this to his soldiers. But he also couldn’t abandon them to this hell. So like a good fairy he hovered over their preparations for departure.”

“You could see right away, thought the commander, that he was one of those people bullets didn’t want to hit. There aren’t many folks who enjoy that kind of luck, though they’ll pay for it elsewhere, as things tend to go with good and bad luck. Life is impartial, it plays no favorites. If a person is offered something that is not equally accessible to all in equal measure, they’ll also be given something bad, meaning they’ll be greater losers in other realms. So the radio and telegraph operator, say, was spared the bullets, but he often tripped and fell, and it may have been a fall that additionally shielded him from bullets. The radio and telegraph operator may have stumbled exactly when the fingers of three snipers were on their triggers, and his tumble removed him from the enemies’ field of vision.”

“…the sky began to redden and the shadows, hidden until then by the dark, began shivering with anticipation. In no time they’d be venturing into the world, all they needed was to be told whether to go in front of or behind the soldiers. Shadows have a way of moving slowly and faltering, but when they finally make up their minds, their resolve is legendary. And so, when the soldiers set out on their “punitive expedition,” as the commander noted in his ledger, the shadows followed behind the soldiers, fused to their heels. When the soldiers returned, the shadows were still swinging from their heels, but with none of the earlier joy. In a word, the shadows on that brief journey downhill and uphill aged quickly, perhaps a little too quickly. Anyone would have aged who’d seen what the shadows saw; it’s enough to say they became darker, more somber, more hermetically sealed. Who knows what they might have said if only they’d had skill with words.”

Have you read ‘Checkpoint’? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – The Use of Man by Aleksandar Tišma (Translated by Bernard Johnson)

I discovered Aleksandar Tišma’s ‘The Use of Man‘ through a friend’s recommendation.

It is the year 1935. A teacher in Novi Sad goes to the stationery shop, buys a diary and starts writing in it. At some point, this diary ends up in one of her students’ hands. This student has a boyfriend who has another friend. And suddenly our horizons widen, as we get to know more about these three people, and their families. The story keeps moving back and forth across time, as we follow the fates of the main characters and the people who are part of their lives. As this was also a complex time in history, when the Nazis, the Hungarians and later the Russians all occupied Novi Sad, and as our characters have complex social backgrounds and political persuasions, their lives get entangled in complicated ways, and the story tells us that.

‘The Use of Man‘ is a complex novel. It doesn’t have a linear structure and the story keeps moving across time, back and forth. Also some chapters are different from others, because they look like meticulous descriptions and lists. There is a reason for this and it is explained in the introduction. The characters in the book are all fascinating – complex, flawed, capable of beautiful things while at the same time doing the not-so-good things. In other words, they are all human. I loved the character of Vera, the girl who discovers her teacher’s diary. The way she evolves is very fascinating. Her boyfriend Milinko is very interesting too, as he is one of the nice characters in the book. His friendship with Vera’s father, and how their shared love for books and learning brings them together is very beautifully depicted. Mikinko’s friend Sredoje is one of the most complex characters in the book and because of that he is very fascinating. There is a German captain whom I liked very much and there is a minor character called Mitzi who is always bursting with energy, who is very likeable.

There is a beautiful introduction to the book by Claire Messud in which she puts the book in context and explains many of the things in the book, like a good teacher. If you are a seasoned reader, you probably already know this, but if you are like me (I’ve burnt your fingers many times reading the introduction before reading the book), I’d recommend that you read the book first and then read the introduction after that, as the introduction has many spoilers.

‘The Use of Man‘ is one of the classics of contemporary Serbian literature. I’m glad I read it. This is also my first NYRB book. So, Yay! 😊 I learnt a lot about the history of the period and I want to read more. I loved reading my first Aleksandar Tišma book. Aleksandar Tišma has written two more books set in Novi Sad and I want to read them sometime.

I’ll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

“At last she came to understand that having achieved her independence, she was going to be left too independent, in fact, completely alone, and that she was not up to such solitude.”

“It’s like people. Even nations borrow from each other. Nothing is born in a vacuum, nothing develops from itself alone, and anyone who claims otherwise—usually to laud the culture to which he belongs—is lying. All life is imitation. The way we live in this house is a copy of the way my father and mother lived in it, and they in turn patterned themselves on others. This kind of home, these objects, the storeroom in the back, the courtyard through which one passes from the private world into the business world and back again, all existed long ago, before this house, and served as a model when it was built and furnished. You could probably trace the migration of this type of merchant’s house, going back in time, from street to street, from the outskirts of town to the center, from town to city. Thus Novi Sad would perhaps lead you to Szeged, Szeged to Pest, Pest to Vienna, Vienna to Berlin. It might have been in 1862, or 1852, when this kind of merchant’s house was first adopted in Berlin. The same goes for books, whether they contain artistic material or whether they are of a scientific nature. Invariably you find traces of imitation.”

Have you read ‘The Use of Man‘? What do you think about it?

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Book Review – Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš

I got Danilo Kiš’ ‘Garden, Ashes‘ a few days back. I was so excited about it, because it took me a long time to get this book, because Danilo Kiš’ books are hard to come by.

The narrator of the story is a boy called Andi Schaum. He tells us about his family, his mother, his sister, and his father. A significant part of the book is about his father. Through the book the family’s circumstances seem to be changing from good to bad to worse. And they are constantly moving from one place to another. In these circumstances, Andi describes his life and life around him and narrates his experiences while growing up.

This is the simplistic version of the plot. But this is not all what the book is about. The Holocaust looms large in the background, though it is only implied and hinted at and never explicitly mentioned, but we can feel its dark shadow throughout the book.

The book can be read as a coming-of-age story, a boy’s story about his father, a story about the Holocaust, or even as Danilo Kiš’ veiled memoir.

For me, the thing I loved the most about the book is this. Danilo Kiš’ prose sizzles throughout the book. In some places, there are beautiful sentences. But in other places, and these were my favourite parts, there were long passages of absolute beauty, which were almost Proustian in their depth and elegance. These were so pleasurable to read and gave me goosebumps. These passages continued till the end of the book – one of the last ones is a passage in which Andi and his mother light a lamp in the evening and start talking (I think) and it is magical. I waited for these long passages to arrive and when one of them arrived I read it slowly and immersed myself in it, and then contemplated on it for a while, and then went back and read it again. The book is slim at 170-pages, but that slimness contains such immeasurable, poetic beauty. I am sharing some of those passages below for your pleasure.

“I am sure that I will not be able to fall asleep that night. I have been lying awake long that it seems to me that dawn should already be at hand, so I lift my head to hear if the others are asleep or are just pretending, but then I sense that my head is drooping from tiredness and that I will not really be meeting the dawn awake. Yet there is no way for me to comprehend how sleep comes on all at once, without any effort of will or knowledge on my part, how I can fall asleep every night without catching hold of that instant when the angel of sleep, that great butterfly of night, swoops down to close my eyes with its wings. So I begin to set an ambush for that instant. I would have liked to catch hold of sleep at least once, just as I had been resolved to catch hold of death one day, to catch hold of the wings of the angel of sleep when it came for me, to grab it with two fingers like a butterfly after sneaking up on it from behind. I use precisely this metaphor because when I say “the angel of sleep” I am thinking – just as I was when I believed in the angel of sleep – of the moment when the waking state passes into the state of oblivion, for I long believed – and I think I was right – that this shift occurs all of a sudden, for – if the organism lulls itself to sleep over a long interval – consciousness has to sink all at once, like a stone. And yet I wanted to catch the angel of sleep in its insidious fortress…”

“Notes at the bottom of pages and all the ideograms – crosses, crescents, asterisks – were supplanted by whole pages of manuscript in a tight hand. Abbreviations became subchapters, subchapters became chapters. The original idea of a combined guidebook-baedeker had become just a tiny, provocatory reproductive cell that was dividing, like a primitive organism, in geometrical progression. In the end, all that remained of the ‘Bus, Ship, Rail, and Air Travel Guide’ was a shriveled cocoon, an ideogram, a bracket, an abbreviation here and there. In the meantime, the underlying text and marginalia and footnotes had absorbed this delicate, utilitarian, unstable structure that now stood almost invisible and wholly adjunct on the varicolored map of the world of essence, and this fabricated and abstract prototopic was represented only by the thin lines of meridians and parallels in the immense structure of some eight hundred pages, single-spaced. The text stubbornly, obstinately retained its original title as a travel guide, reflecting the sick confusion in my father’s mind : he actually believed that some publishers would be fooled by this obvious fraud and publish his chaotic compendium under the guise of an innocent timetable-travelogue.”

I loved ‘Garden, Ashes‘. It is one of my favourite books of the year. I’ve met only a few Danilo Kiš fans on the internet, but every one of them has raved about him. Though he was one of the literary stars during his lifetime, it is sad that he is less well-known today. I wish his books are more widely read.

Have you read ‘Garden, Ashes‘? What do you think about it?

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