The Book Of Blam

Description

The war is over. Miroslav Blam walks along the former Jew Street, and he remembers. He remembers Aaron Grun, the hunchbacked watchmaker; and Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; and Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; and Arthur Spitzer, a grocer, who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sandor Vertes, a lawyer who was a Communist. All dead. As are his younger sister and his best friend, a Serb, both of whom joined the resistance movement; and his mother and father in the infamous Novi Sad raid in January 1942--when the Hungarian Arrow Cross executed 1,400 Jews and Serbs on the banks of the Danube and tossed them into the water. Blam lives. So long as he does, the war will never be over for him. Like The Use of Man, and part of Tisma's lauded Novi Sad Trilogy, The Book of Blam is a searing look at the spiritual devastation of war.

Aleksandar Tisma (1924-2003) was a fiction writer, journalist, and poet who grew up in and lived much of his life in Novi Sad. His other novels include The Use of Man (available from NYRB Classics) and Kapo. Michael Henry Heim (1943 - 2012) was a translator and professor of Slavic languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. He translated the NYRB Classic, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, by Bohumil Hrabal. Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. The Lunatic, his latest volume of poetry, and The Life of Images, a book of his selected prose, were published in April 2015.

"One of the most stirring novels to come from the Balkans."-Larry Wolff The New York Times "A startling, extraordinary creation." -The New Yorker "Tisma has made Novi Sad a microcosm for the most painful developments of 20th-century history. It is a city of tiers, one tier the actual city in which Miroslav survives, the other filled by the possible lives of those who perished. Yet life on the edge of the abyss is surprisingly normal...The intersection of this high intellectual refinement with the most brutal incidents in history gives the novel, which has been published to acclaim in France and Germany, its great, eccentric pathos." -Publishers Weekly "A Balkan bible presided over by an ironic vision of the imagination, capable of envisioning utter barbarity but not the expiation for sins."-The Boston Globe "Tisma is unrelenting in his quest for truth yet compassionate in his judgments of individuals."-The Wall Street Journal