Damned Yard and Other Stories - Softcover

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Serbo-Croation

Andric, winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature, has set several works in his native Bosnia. These new translations examine the roots of racial and religious conflict in the modern Yugoslav republics. In Days of the Consuls , the 19th-century city of Travnik plays host to both their Turkish vizier and to new French and Austrian consuls. Native Bosnian insularity confronts the arrival of the consuls and the new political balance. The resulting cultural, linguistic, racial, and religious tensions provide a unique perspective on today's crisis. In the stories found in Damned Yard , extremes of cultural incompatibility are personified in innocent symbols like elephants and bridges, while today's racial hatreds are clearly delineated in "Letter from the Year 1920." Both these works have been published here before ( Damned Yard , Grove, 1962; The Day of the Consuls as Bosnian Chronicle , Knopf, 1963), but the excellence of these translations argues for their purchase. Recommended for all libraries whose patrons seeks a deeper understanding of the basis of the Yugoslavian civil war; nonfiction does not have a corner on the truth.
- Ruth M. Ross, Olympic Coll. Lib., Bremerton, Wash.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.