Omer Pasha Latas

Celia Hawkesworth, Ivo Andric

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English

New York Review Books
18 October 2018

Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Historical adventure

Sarajevo, 1850. It is the story of Omer Pasha Latas, born Mihailo Latas into a Serbian Orthodox family living on the eastern edge of the Hapsburg empire. When Mihailo's chances of a military career in Austria fail, he flees across the border into Ottoman Bosnia. He converts to Islam and makes his way to Istanbul where his exceptional intelligence and qualities as a potential military leader are recognized by the Sultan. Having distinguished himself in mercilessly suppressing uprisings in Albania, Syria and Kurdistan, and subsequently in Montenegro, Herzegovina and Albania, in the year 1850 the Sultan sends Omer Pasha to Bosnia to quell resistance by local landowners to modernizing reforms. Now in the land of his fathers, Omer Pasha's display and misuse of power is all the more urgent but also more complex. Along with an exquisitely drawn array of local characters, Andric portrays a man at once supremely arrogant and pitifully vulnerable, and a city in the grip of fear.

A sweeping epic by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andrić about power, identity, and Islam set in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia and Istanbul.

Omer Pasha Latas is set in nineteenth-century Sarajevo, where

Muslims and Christians live in uneasy proximity while entertaining a

common resentment of faraway Ottoman rule. Omer is the seraskier,

commander in chief of the Sultan's armies, and as the book begins he

arrives from Istanbul, dispatched to bring Sarajevo's landowners to

heel, a task that he accomplishes with his usual ferocity and

efficiency. And yet the seraskier's expedition to Bosnia is a time of

reckoning for him as well- he was born in the Balkans, a Serb and a

subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bright boy who escaped his

father's financial disgrace by running away and converting to Islam.

Now, at the height of his power, he heads an army of misfits,

adventurers, and outcasts from across Europe and Asia, and yet wherever

he goes he remains a stranger.

Ivo Andrić, who won the Nobel Prize in 1961, is a spellbinding storyteller and a magnificent stylist, and here, in his final novel, he surrounds his enigmatic central figure with many vivid and fascinating minor characters, lost souls and hopeless dreamers all, in a world that is slowly sliding towards disaster. Omer Pasha Latas combines the leisurely melancholy of Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March with the stark fatalism of an old ballad.

By: Celia Hawkesworth, Ivo Andric
Imprint: New York Review Books
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: Main
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 127mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 305g
ISBN: 9781681372525
ISBN 10: 1681372525
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 18 October 2018
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Ivo Andric (1892-1975) was born in Travnik, Bosnia, to Roman Catholic parents and grew up alongside Orthodox Christians and Muslims. A founding member of the first Yugoslav youth organisation in Bosnia, he was imprisoned in 1914 for his involvement in the Young Bosnia independence movement. He served in the Yugoslav diplomatic service until 1941 when he returned definitively to Belgrade. His first work appeared in 1914 and he published six volumes of short stories and five novels, as well as verse, essays and reflective prose. In 1961 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1975. Celia Hawkesworth has translated several books from the Serbo-Croatian, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka UgreUic, which was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Tranlation; Leica Format and Belladonna by DaUa Drndic; and Adios, Cowboy by Olja Savicevic. She taught Serbian and Croatian at the University of London for many years. She lives in London.

Reviews for Omer Pasha Latas

Andric possesses the rare gift in a historical novelist of creating a period-piece, full of local colour, and at the same time characters who might have been living today. --Times Literary Supplement The historical context will be unfamiliar to most readers, but the issues, of good and evil, identity and fate, are universal. --Kirkus