Omer Pasha Latas

Description

A sweeping epic by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andric about power, identity, and Islam set in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia and Istanbul. This previously untranslated historical novel by the Nobel Prize-winner Andric tells the story of Omer Pasha Latas, born Mihailo Latas, a Serbian Christian who rose to a position of power in the Ottoman Empire. When Mihailo's chances of a military career in Austria fail, he flees across the border into Ottoman Bosnia, 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, Omer Pasha is sent to Bosnia in 1850 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, Ivo Andric portrays a man who is both supremely arrogant and pitifully vulnerable, and a city in the grip of fear.

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 Ugresic, which was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Tranlation; Leica Format and Belladonna by Dasa Drndic; and Adios, Cowboy by Olja Savicevic. She taught Serbian and Croatian at the University of London for many years. She lives in London.

"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