Bosnia and Herzegovina / All works
Novel
Ugursuz
Not translated into English
Nedžad Ibrišimović · 1968
Synopsis
In nineteenth-century Ottoman Bosnia, an old family of begs falls apart and sinks into misfortune. Everything passes through Muzafer, mute and ill, who often loses consciousness: we read only his thoughts, broken by his absences, and this narrator is as unreliable as he is striking. Through him, the novel expresses Bosnian suffering after the failure of the autonomy movement of Husein-kapetan Gradaščević, in 1831, and the fear of the time when Omer Pasha Latas marches on Bosnia, in 1852, as well as the quest for a lost identity.
Context
Published in Sarajevo in 1968, the book won its author, at twenty-eight, the city's 6 April Prize and was received as an aesthetic shock. The first part of what he later called his Muslim trilogy, it departs from the realist painting of Andrić, Selimović or Derviš Sušić: metaphorical and symbolic, it turns history into an abstraction. Muzafer's monologue recalls Faulkner's stream of consciousness, in which one narrator is likewise mute and ill. The novel was translated into Czech as early as 1976, then into Albanian and Turkish.
Who it is for
For readers who like difficult novels, carried by an inner voice, and the history of Bosnia seen from within.
Prizes and reception
Critics count it among the best novels of Bosnian literature, and it remains its author's best-known work.
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