Customer Reviews

The Slave Girl and Other Stories (CEU Press Classics)

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Ivo Andric is tragically neglected. Coming from an unfashionable part of Europe has crippled the legacy of a writer who deserves to be as well known as Gogol and Turgenyev, if not Chekhov, Tolstory or Dostoyevski. Ivo Andric once wrote, "Looking the whole day and a good part of the night at the sea, high mountains, bare and forested, and the little places scattered along the shore, ancient human roads and settlements, a man seems to himself not only mortal and transient, but as though he had never existed." I don't think the world has quite forgotten Andric, and I for one, am grateful for it.

Ivo Andric won the Nobel in 1961 for his stories about Bosnia. He is most famous for the novel The Bridge on the Drina, which for most readers is the main Andric experience. Yet, according to the Introduction in this volume, Andric was foremost a short-story writer and not a novelist. His novels are really collections of stories, weaved together to form a whole (except for The Woman from Sarajevo which is his one work most like a traditional novel). So to really appreciate Andric you have to know he was a prolific short-story writer who published 6 volumes of short stories, most of which have never been translated into English. Only in 2009 was a second collection of stories translated and published, by Central European Press under review here, using as theme those stories that have a woman as a central character. It's a hugely generous volume at over 535 pages, footnotes and glossary, two introductions (one at over 20 pages is equal to anything in a Oxford or Penguin edition). There are 22 stories total, 2 of which are 100 page novellas. Ten of the stories I think are classics and easily stand up to anything by Tolstoy or Thomas Mann, two authors he is commonly compared to. The quality of the stories, exotic setting and writing blew me away. This is a great and unexpected find, it is my first Andric and I plan to continue reading more of his "wisdom literature".

Andric mostly writes about small provincial mountain villages, kasabas, in Turkish Bosnia during the 19th century. The mixture of Christian and Muslim is well known to modern readers who have followed the wars in the Balkans in the late 20th century, here we have a taste of the origins of those conflicts. The pre-industrial rugged and colorful beauty of the landscape, dress, manners, food, etc.. are reflected in the stories of the people. Andric has a whiff of ancient tales, like old people recounting the stories of evil deeds from times past as a warning to the young (Kyser Soze!). Yet they are not moralizing. They tell how things happened with no clear answer why. Andric tells the events of what people do, but does not try to determine why, he doesn't psychologically analyze, and so people do things for no clear reason, which is really how life is. Andric is focused on what people do, and the consequences of those actions on other people around them. The cause seems to be self-evident in the texture of the background - the geography, the customs, history and political events, human foibles. It's really a simple approach, ancient in style, akin to verbal storytelling such as fairy-tales, but Andric raises it to timeless literature.

I had never heard of the author (a Nobel Prize winner and diplomat) until I was surfing amazon titles on othoman / balcanic chronicles. This book is precious! It pictures a pluricultural and plurireligious society placed on the border of Eastern / Western World and disputed by two empires: othoman and austro-hungarian. It assumes the form of chronicles of gendered characters - women - an the role religion, tradition and politics play in their lives and behaviours. Context descriptions of towns and landscapes are also impressive and, as feedback to up to date issues taking place in contemporary Europe, it is possible to draw parallels between laws aiming to restrict religious and political practises on plural societies aiming its homogenization - repressive towards diversity and targeting the demonization of the "other - stranger". The women of different communities pictured under a centralized power is revealed so brilliantly that sometimes the aknowledgement of their role as mere objects feels almost phisically painful.

This is a superb collection of short stories by one of the GREATEST (sadly lesser known) authors of the 20th century.