Novel
The Use of Man
Употреба човека
Aleksandar Tišma · 1976
Synopsis
Novi Sad, 1945. Sredoje Lazukić returns from the war with the partisans and finds, in the empty house of his friend Vera, the diary of the old spinster who taught them German, titled “Poésie”. The novel then goes back to the years before the war, when Vera, who is half Jewish, her cousin Sep, her friend Milinko and Sredoje were schoolboys and schoolgirls who danced and courted one another, and then follows what the war makes of each of them: the camps, Nazism, the maquis, the taste for murder.
Context
The novel was published by Nolit in 1976 and forms, with a book of 1972 and another of 1987, the trilogy that the author devoted to Novi Sad during the war. It received the Nolit Prize, then the NIN Prize, and the Library of Serbia named it the most-read book of 1978. Bernard Johnson's English translation appeared in 1988, reissued in 2014 in the New York Review Books classics; the French translation was published by L'Âge d'Homme.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred and fifty pages, in a cold and precise style. It helps to know that Hungary annexed Vojvodina in 1941 and carried out massacres of Serbs and Jews there in 1942.
Prizes and reception
NIN Prize 1976, its author's best-known work, regarded outside Serbia as one of the great European novels of the twentieth century.