Today News: October 2018

Budget 2018: Self-employed face higher tax and NI payments

Freelance groups describe tax changes as a "smash and grab raid"

from BBC News - Business https://bbc.in/2qiiAa2

Budget 2018: Philip Hammond hails better borrowing figures

Borrowing is set to keep falling, but the chancellor all but abandons a target to eliminate the deficit.

from BBC News - Business https://bbc.in/2Q8pOJ9

Bitcoin: The first ten years

Bitcoin was born ten years ago. What has it brought the world?

from BBC News - Business https://bbc.in/2qjUZWH

Budget 2018: Chancellor abolishes PFI for future projects

The government will not enter into further Private Finance Initiative projects, but will honour those under way, says the chancellor.

from BBC News - Business https://bbc.in/2Q9o2aS

Budget 2018: Chancellor on austerity 'finally coming to an end'

Philip Hammond opens his Budget speech "for Britain's future", saying it would be for "the strivers, the grafters and the carers".

from BBC News - Business https://bbc.in/2AA5Dyp

US mail bombs: Who is financier George Soros?

The billionaire financier and philanthropist was targeted in a US mail-bombing campaign.

from BBC News - Business https://bbc.in/2Q9pI40

Do schools help or hinder social mobility?

"Meritocracy is the big promise of our democracies," says the OECD. But are education systems delivering?

from BBC News - Business https://bbc.in/2qlW7sK

What should I do with my broken kettle?

Our household appliances could have much longer lives if they were designed to be easily repaired.

from BBC News - Business https://bbc.in/2Q8NZHB

The Faces of Change in the Midterm Elections

By K.K. REBECCA LAI, DENISE LU, LISA LERER and TROY GRIGGS from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2CNRDCR

India Unveils World’s Tallest Statue, Twice the Size of Lady Liberty

By DANIEL VICTOR from NYT World https://nyti.ms/2P0yO6N

On Politics: Trump Wants to End Birthright Citizenship With Executive Order

By Unknown Author from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2CPXqYy

A Weekend at Witch Camp

By VALERIYA SAFRONOVA from NYT Style https://nyti.ms/2P0yLrt

Word + Quiz: jamboree

By THE LEARNING NETWORK from NYT The Learning Network https://nyti.ms/2CPdEB0

Pittsburgh, Venice, Whitey Bulger: Your Wednesday Briefing

By PENN BULLOCK from NYT Briefing https://nyti.ms/2P3Cftv

What’s on TV Wednesday: ‘Scary Movie’ and ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’

By GABE COHN from NYT Arts https://nyti.ms/2CRJvkw

Baby Antonio: 5 Pounds, 12 Ounces and Homeless From Birth

By NIKITA STEWART and GABRIELLA ANGOTTI-JONES from NYT New York https://nyti.ms/2OYZq7X

Hartman Scores Twice as Predators Beat Golden Knights 4-1

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS from NYT Sports https://nyti.ms/2CRl1bb

Rescue Workers Search for Missing After Typhoon Strikes Philippines

By JASON GUTIERREZ from NYT World https://nyti.ms/2OXv1qG

Amid Scrutiny, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Shaped Trump’s Pittsburgh Response

By KATIE ROGERS and MAGGIE HABERMAN from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2CPW1Be

In California, the Search for a Missing 800-Pound Hammer Continues

By MATT STEVENS from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2P1WQhy

Quotation of the Day: Move Would Have Widespread Ramifications for Many American Families

By Unknown Author from NYT Today’s Paper https://nyti.ms/2CPVYFy

Review: In ‘Days of Rage,’ the Revolution Will Be Trivialized

By JESSE GREEN from NYT Theater https://nyti.ms/2P1Jm5i

Review: Remembering What Was and Wasn’t in ‘Good Grief’

By BEN BRANTLEY from NYT Theater https://nyti.ms/2CTPbuG

Penguins and Islanders Honor Victims of Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS from NYT Sports https://nyti.ms/2P1JlOM

Corrections: October 31, 2018

By Unknown Author from NYT Corrections https://nyti.ms/2CPXo2S

36 Teenagers Show Us Their Generation

By KATHERINE SCHULTEN from NYT The Learning Network https://nyti.ms/2OYT88p

Resting Place

By DEB AMLEN from NYT Crosswords & Games https://nyti.ms/2CPVMGk

Thomas Campbell, Ex-Director of the Met, Is Hired to Lead San Francisco Museums

By SARAH MERVOSH from NYT Arts https://nyti.ms/2Js3JCW

A Trokosi Mirror of the US-Mexican Border: On Bernice L. McFadden’s “Praise Song for the Butterflies”

IT IS UNCANNY when a book arrives at a particularly riveting moment, one in which the book’s reflection of current events is dizzying. How would an unsuspecting reader know that Bernice L. McFadden’s latest novel — a tale of modern-day slavery in another hemisphere, depicting the practice of trokosi — would resonate so deeply on our own shores?

I read this tale of separation, betrayal, and internecine secrets during a time when children were torn from the bosoms of their families at the US-Mexican border, emphasizing both actions for what they are: barbaric. McFadden’s novel is the story of a nine-year-old child who was dropped off at a temple prison and kept in a cage of tradition and inhumanity — meanwhile, here in the United States, children from South and Central America were sleeping on the floor in enclosures made of mesh wire. As of mid-September 2018, some 12,800 immigrant children were still being held in detention. It is a stunning, gut-punching moment to realize that trokosi, a cultural and governmental injustice and crime in West Africa, is mirrored right here in the United States. It is an action so loathsome, so unimaginable that the story tears at the reader’s heart as if clawed by wild animals. This is obviously the author’s intention. Readers familiar with McFadden’s body of work — 15 books altogether under her given and pen names — will not be surprised by the power of the tale.

Look at little Abeo, kindergarten age, twirling and starring in her family’s comfortable production of a life. Now, see that same innocent child, a girl child covering herself in some loose rough garment, with nothing to eat but a thick tasteless porridge, as she serves as the sexual slave of men who call themselves priests. (Yes, there are quite a few parallels to Christian and Catholic churches.) Get to know Abeo, merely a girl bearing rape and childbirth as soon as she bleeds. Her story leaves you feeling cracked open.

Trokosi, as defined by the author, “comes from the Ewe words tro, meaning deity or fetish, and kosi, meaning female slave.” It is this horrific practice that McFadden’s work illuminates. It is the belief in and practice of abandoning girls to serve life sentences as slaves to temple priests in order to protect their families from the gods’ anger — the sacrifice of an innocent for the sake of family honor, as punishment, and all beliefs that aim to make slavery palpable. In McFadden’s capable hands, these reasons ring as hollow as they are.

From the opening, McFadden reveals how sudden elements of violence, hatred, and death can insert themselves during a routine walk to work. In the familiar rhythm of an ancient folk tale, set mainly in the imaginary West African nation of Ukemby, the author asks what happens when the “village” not only fails a child but also sacrifices her.

The novel shifts back and forth in time covering more than three decades, from 1978 to 2009, covering numerous unforgettable characters on two continents. At its core is Abeo’s story. Abeo is the first and treasured daughter in the prosperous, safe household of Wasik Kata, an accountant with a cushy job with the Ukemby government treasury, and his wife, Ismae Kata, a beautiful, graceful former model. Cherished, inquisitive, a bit spoiled, and part of what Ismae assures her husband makes “the life I’ve always dreamed of having,” Abeo is the cynosure of the privileged home — teased, coddled, encouraged to dream, and danced about in fancy dresses. All of this begins to fall apart, however, as Wasik’s fortunes wane. Soon, the family’s spiritual and corporal life follows suit. A political turn leads to suspicion and the loss of employment for Wasik. Folks recall his grandfather’s accident that killed two female goat kids, a parent’s death, unacknowledged family secrets, a child’s sickness, bruised male ego, and lost potency. All common vagaries of life merge, spelling more than just bad luck for the cozy Kata domicile. A curse befalls their house.

It is this perceived pox on their peaceful household and good name that leads to sudden, unthinkable action. Wasik, who has earlier teased his daughter Abeo for being a “sleepyhead,” snatches her from bed one night and takes her on a horrifying, frenzied, heartbreaking ride through the dark countryside and urban streets in search of an emergency shrine. Just like that, without explanation, goodbyes, or even a backward glance from her father, seven-year-old Abeo is abandoned at night in a makeshift village of strangers. Still mesmerized by women’s jewelry and video tapes of The Wizard of Oz, this fragile spunky girl has just been ripped from the only people she knows and dropped like a slaughtered lamb into an encampment without rudimentary electricity and running water. Thus begins her first night of slavery, pummeled with unfamiliar harsh words, commands, and abuse from older women who drip contempt and hatred like venom on her smooth brown skin.

The next morning, Abeo awakes to find herself still in the nightmarish world of trokosi. Her doting father truly did offer her up to the “devil” and toss her into hell wearing only a nightshirt and sandals. The action and its repercussions are as unimaginable for the reader as for little Abeo. For this child — terrified, traumatized, and confused — it only gets worse.

The novel has a timeless quality; McFadden is a master of taking you to another time and place. In doing so, she raises questions surrounding the nature of memory, what we allow to thrive, and what we determine to execute. Praise Song for the Butterflies is a cautionary tale with a cruel twist. There are Wasik and those who collude with him to keep Abeo in captivity, and there are also the innocent victims. But what of little Abeo? What is she to take away from her fate? Trust no one? Believe that there is no fate worse than being born a woman?

The novel also brings to mind the 276 female students kidnapped more than four years ago by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria; girls and young women snatched from the seeming safety of school, some of whom are still in captivity, some palmed out to men like chattel to be wives and servants, some who have most likely perished.

McFadden brings the sweeping drama of her earlier works — The Book of Harlan, Glorious, Gathering of Waters — into this small book, and reminds me of the gentle fierceness of Edwidge Danticat’s writing. Despite the novel’s spare style and story line, there is fleeting joy and relief — kernels of respite as simple as a stolen mango furtively shared by Abeo and the girls, some of whom pray each night for death:

They all stared at the mango as if it were a brick of gold.
“You stole it?”
Juba grinned. “It fell off the truck and rolled to the side of the road. I didn’t steal it, I rescued it!”

There is clearly more to be “rescued” than a precious ripe mango. Questions of physical and mental abandonment loom large in this compact novel, along with issues of ancient and current ritual servitude, responsibility for choices, and forgiveness. McFadden asks why some of us are so easily forgotten and some are impossible to forget.

For me, the sparseness of Praise Song is one of its strengths; for some, it may be a weakness. As with tales this succinctly written, there is always the danger that it is too spare, leaving the reader wanting more detail. This is what happens when, in a quiet moment, each of Abeo’s sisters in slavery shares the story of how she ended up imprisoned in a dusty village with a lifetime sentence of sexual and physical work. The stories are so brief that the entire scene feels like a roundup of the local news — heartbreaking, enthralling news — but a truncated version of the truth. Additionally, in the process, the author sometimes slips into the habit of dumbing down the language, stealing the power of a scene already told in perfect tone. This happens when 11-year-old Abeo is summoned to her first rape by the assistant to the old temple priest: “Two weeks after Abeo completed her third menstrual cycle, Darkwa darkened the doorway of their hut and pointed at Abeo. ‘You, come with me.’”

Yet there is also redemption for some of the tortured and imprisoned. McFadden is too accomplished a storyteller to leave the reader with anything less; yet it is redemption hard-won and fragile as a butterfly’s wings.

Tina McElroy Ansa is the author of the novels Baby of the Family, Ugly Ways, The Hand I Fan With, You Know Better, and Taking After Mudear. She is completing Secrets of a Bogart Queen, a work of nonfiction.

The post A Trokosi Mirror of the US-Mexican Border: On Bernice L. McFadden’s “Praise Song for the Butterflies” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2DcGVXn

Almost Too Sober: On the Appeal of Stoicism

SOME OF US want to be rock stars or rocket scientists when we grow up, while others want to be actors or athletes. Marcus Aurelius, though, wanted to grow up to be a Stoic. That, at least, is the impression Marguerite Yourcenar gives us in her novel Memoirs of Hadrian. This brilliant reimagining of the Roman imperial period is cast as a letter written by the dying Hadrian to the teenage Marcus Aurelius he has chosen to succeed him. While Hadrian admires his “dear Mark,” he also chides him. He was, Hadrian recalls, an “almost too sober little boy” who had grown into a young man a tad too zealous in his practice of “the mortifications of the Stoics.”

What would Hadrian — or, at least, Yourcenar’s Hadrian — have made of our current craze with Stoicism? While it is too late for many of us to grow up to become Stoics, more than a few of us want to finish up as Stoics. Princeton University Press’s new edition of Epictetus’s Encheiridion and selected Discourses, titled How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life, is the latest entry in a wave of works, both popular and scholarly, on Stoicism. Massimo Pigliucci’s How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life and Donald Robertson’s Stoicism and the Art of Happiness are fresh additions to the former category, while A. A. Long’s classic Stoic Studies and Pierre Hadot’s La citadelle intérieure: Introduction aux Pensées de Marc Aurèle are notable examples of the latter category.

How to Be Free seeks to bridge the worlds of both kinds of readers. Translated and introduced by Long, a renowned scholar of Stoicism and classics professor at UC Berkeley, the work presents the Greek text and English translation on facing pages. While the original text is, well, Greek to me, Long’s translation is sharp and straightforward — qualities always associated with Epictetus’s teachings. Like Socrates, Epictetus did not write down his words; it is thanks to his student Arrian — who became one of Hadrian’s closest aides — that we have the Encheiridion (or “handbook”) and Discourses. But whereas, in Plato’s writings, Socrates often serves as a proxy for his student’s own philosophical agenda, Arrian’s transcription of this freed slave’s words seems free of invention.

Most important, Socrates and Epictetus — though separated by more than four centuries — are alike in the coherence between their convictions and actions. One of the few, and certainly best known (if not substantiated) of episodes we have from Epictetus’s life occurred when he was still a slave. In a fit of rage, his master began to twist his leg. In a calm voice, the slave warned him that the leg would break. The master, ignoring the warning, broke Epictetus’s leg, prompting the maimed man to declare in an even voice: “Did I not tell you it would break?”

It is not clear whether Epictetus’s lameness was a result of his master’s inhumanity or, more prosaically, the consequence of arthritis. What is clear, though, is that Epictetus’s experience as a slave shaped his philosophy. The term philosophy now generally brings to mind an academic discipline, whose practitioners publish peer-reviewed journal articles and academic monographs that reexamine questions ranging from epistemology and ontology to linguistics and metaphysics or, more broadly, reassess the history of their profession. As anyone familiar with this world can report, its language and concerns are often difficult and demanding. This is not, by itself, a problem: readers of Joyce and Woolf, Dickinson and Faulkner, treasure the moments of luminous truths and insights these writers conjure in their difficult and demanding works.

But I am not alone, I suspect, in thinking that academic philosophers, with a few important exceptions, are mostly wanting when it comes to lasting truths or insights. All too often their present world seems light-years distant from the world in which I live and for which I would welcome the wisdom their profession supposedly offers. As Hadot declared in a series of interviews with the American philosopher Arnold Davidson: “The historian of philosophy must cede her place to the philosopher — the philosopher who must always remain alive within the historian of philosophy. This final task will consist in asking oneself, with unflinching candor, the decisive question: ‘What is it to philosophize?’”

In his revelatory writings on ancient Greek and Roman schools of philosophy, Hadot argues that it is not what passes for philosophizing nowadays. Rather than offering, as do modern philosophy departments, a smorgasbord of courses in various sub-disciplines, the ancient philosophical schools offered what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” — namely, the means to change the way you saw the world and the power to change your very self.

While there was no shortage of such schools — Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics, Platonists, and Aristotelians all had their shingles out — they all promised not only to inform their students about a particular philosophy, but also to transform them by it. In this sense, a novice’s choice of a particular school was existential. The urgency of, say, Albert Camus’s voice in The Myth of Sisyphus — no one, he reminds us, “ever died for the ontological argument” — had been sounded more than two millennia earlier by the Roman statesman, writer, and philosopher Seneca. Berating those philosophers who busied themselves batting around theoretical questions, he roared: “There is no time for playing around […] You have promised to bring help to the shipwrecked, the imprisoned, the sick, the needy, to those whose heads are under the poised axe […] What are you doing?”

As we learn from the Encheiridion, Epictetus was not one for playing around. He warned his students:

Do you suppose you can go in for philosophy and eat and drink just as you do now or get angry and irritated in the same way? You are going to have to go without sleep, work really hard, stay away from friends and family, be disrespected by a young slave, get mocked by people in the street, and come off worse in rank, office, or courtroom, everywhere in fact.

For Epictetus, Stoicism was not a pastime, but instead it was a set of rigorous practices. With the goal of rebooting one’s life, it is far more demanding, at least from a practical perspective, than the more recondite philosophical schools that have followed. If the Stoics had recruiters, they would have warned that philosophy is the hardest job we’ll ever love.

In both its original Hellenistic and subsequent Roman iterations, Stoicism fastened onto reason’s decisive role in our lives. The compass of our rational faculties allows women and men — Stoicism, along with Epicureanism, was exceptional in its refusal to relegate women to an inferior position — to navigate a world in which we are carried aloft by vast and immovable forces. We cannot master these circumstances, but we can master our attitude toward them. These happenings, for Stoics, are identified mostly as “things indifferent” — namely, events and facts that, in and of themselves, are neither intrinsically bad nor good.

Things indifferent cover those things we tend to care about, but on further reflection reveal themselves to be inconsequential, like the color of my car or the color of my skin. But, more provocatively, things indifferent also cover my social or legal status. What if my skin color condemns me to a life of slavery? As a former slave, Epictetus’s answer is blunt: physical enslavement, as anyone who has attained Stoic wisdom knows, is a thing indifferent. The Stoic knows she must “remove goodness and badness from the things not up to us and ascribe it only to the things that are up to us.” Nearly everything that is external to us — the world’s unfolding warp and woof — is not up to us, but instead to nature.

Crucially, what is up to us is our outlook. By dint of our reason, we can grasp and assent to the way of the world. Though it requires a lifetime of effort to scale these philosophical heights, once I scramble to the summit I will see that mere material and physical things cannot breach what Marcus Aurelius calls the “inner fortress” of my self. And it is within that fortress, whether I am a senator or slave, rich or poor, a centurion or courtesan, that I cultivate what the Stoics called ataraxia, or serenity.

That Stoicism held such great appeal for a certain class of Romans is hardly surprising. Not only did it reflect and reinforce the battery of values, or mos maiorum, that defined the life of a proper thinking Roman, but it also provided a modicum of agency and freedom in a world of imperial domination. Equally unsurprising is that Stoicism now enjoys a revival with a certain class of Americans. In our world of institutional bureaucratization, social fragmentation, and political polarization, the therapeutic promise of Stoicism holds much attraction. It is telling, in this regard, that the founders of cognitive behavioral therapy like Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck were deeply influenced by the ancient Stoics.

Yet there is darkness at the heart of Stoicism — a darkness that, in Yourcenar’s novel, Hadrian glimpses. While he admires the example set by Epictetus — the crippled old man, Hadrian reports, seemed to “enjoy a liberty which was almost divine” — the emperor tells Marcus Aurelius that he nevertheless refuses to embrace either the man or his philosophy. Epictetus, Hadrian muses, “gave up too many things, and I had been quick to observe that nothing was more dangerously easy for me than mere renunciation.” The emperor is on to something. The reach of Stoic renunciation, unflinchingly acknowledged by Epictetus, is much further than most of us would ever wish to go. In one of his prosaic similes, he compares the Stoic’s life to a voyage on a ship commanded by nature. Just as a voyager on a real sea voyage might disembark at a port to gather “a little shellfish and vegetable,” he must be prepared to drop these things and return to the ship at a moment’s notice. So, too, on the ship of life, the Stoic, during a port of call, might gather “a little wife and child.” Ah, but don’t treasure these souvenirs, for “if the captain calls you, run to the boat and leave all those things without even turning around.”

In the Encheiridion, Epictetus — a childless bachelor, mind you — multiplies such examples. Should I want my wife and children to live, not to mention flourish, he lectures me for being “silly” because I want things to be up to me that are not up to me. Should one of my children or wife die, I must never say “I have lost” them. They were never mine in the first place, which is why I should instead say that they have been returned. Classicists like Martha Nussbaum and Richard Sorabji rightly question the consequences and costs of Stoic renunciation. Not only is it good to have attachments to those we love, but it is also necessary; without these attachments, we might enjoy greater security and even serenity, but we would also experience less humanity. We would be, quite simply, less human.

There are other big questions raised by this small handbook. Does not Stoicism, which tells us that economic, political, and social issues are things indifferent, thus encourage forms of political resignation? Is there not the danger that Stoics, in the wide swath they cut with the blade of things indifferent, are in fact conspiring with forms of slavery we could and should resist? Is it really silly to wish with all your heart that your children not only survive you, but flourish as well? Once you put down Epictetus, you might wish to ask yourself whether you side with Hadrian, who accepted his own vulnerability and mourned the loss of his beloved Antinous, or “dear Mark,” who sought to evince his vulnerability by instead loving mere humanity.

Robert Zaretsky teaches in the Honors College at the University of Houston. He is the author of numerous books and articles on French intellectual history. His new book, Catherine & Diderot: An Empress, A Philosopher and the Fate of the Enlightenment, will be published this winter by Harvard University Press.

The post Almost Too Sober: On the Appeal of Stoicism appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2JsJZ1L

The Turk and the Diplomat: An Introduction to Ivo Andrić’s “Omer Pasha Latas”

LARB PRESENTS William T. Vollmann’s introduction to Ivo Andrić’s Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan, translated by Celia Hawkesworth and published by NYRB Classics today.

“If we all had the opportunity, courage and strength to transform just a part of our imaginings […] into reality […] it would be immediately clear to the whole world and to ourselves who we are […] and what we are capable of becoming. […] Fortunately, for most of us, that oppor-tunity never arises. […] But if, by some misfortune, it does happen to someone, that someone finds that we are all merciless judges.” This passage from Omer Pasha Latas is a pretty clear summation of the eponymous protagonist, who lives hated and isolated in the prison of his self-made greatness. It also bears, quite sadly, on various pre-and post-Yugoslav nationalisms.

“I once asked him, ‘What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?’ ‘You know,’ he replied, ‘I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.’”

The questioner was Milovan Djilas, who had fought the Nazis alongside Tito and afterward became a vice president of Yugoslavia. The answerer he described as “lanky and bony […] the career diplomat […] fettered by convention and tact” — thus a certain Dr. Ivo Andrić. In this context, tact may be defined in terms of what we refrain from saying. As it happens, Omer Pasha Latas is a work of brilliant evasion, in which most identities become bafflingly problematic. Who is Omer Pasha? “I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.”

“Right from the war’s end,” relates Djilas, “the government was well organized and firmly in the hands of the Communists. […] Yet though the nation’s younger generation was fired with enthusiasm, its working class loyal, and its party strong and self-confident, Yugoslavia remained a divided, grief-stricken land, materially and spiritually ravaged.” In Djilas’s day, these divisions were most conspicuously ideological — although even then questions of nationalism could break through. After Tito’s death, their ethnic character predominated. In 1994, a Serb explained to me how to express them practically: “It’s easy. In my town all you’d have to do would be to go to where some Serb lived and throw in a hand grenade, then shoot some Croats. A small group of professionally trained people could do it. Then you spread the news and arm the survivors.”

“What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?” Once upon a time, when there was a Yugoslavia, its language used to be called Serbo-Croatian. Let me simplify: the Serbs were mostly Orthodox, their script Cyrillic, and they felt what has been called “the mystical Russian bond”; the Croats were predominantly Catholic, used the Roman alphabet, and sometimes turned toward Germany. Both of them claimed Ivo Andrić. In the interests of federalism their differences were repressed, both psychologically and politically. (I remember a Dalmatian Croat from 1981 who in a low voice identified himself as “Christian.” He said that he could and did go to church, but that his career suffered accordingly.) At great cost, the Titoists had reconstructed and maintained some kind of Yugoslav identity. That Serbs, Croats, and most other Yugoslavs shared a common language, or at least were presumed to do so, may be readily verified by the titles of prewar dictionaries. Their successor nations have now elevated dialects into new languages — Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak, Slovenian — which remain more or less mutually intelligible, although during the war I once or twice witnessed the solemn charades of nationalists communicating to their ex-countrymen through interpreters. In Yugoslavia, there used to be highway signs in both alphabets; nowadays one frequently finds one orthography or the other spray-painted out by the zealots of ethnic correctness. For that matter, on the back cover of this publisher’s galley of Omer Pasha Latas, you could read a biographical note in evidence of this bifurcation: “Celia Hawkesworth has translated several books from the Serbo-Croatian. […] She taught Serbian and Croatian at University College London for many years…”

Yugoslavia, then, was a failed attempt to unify separate and sometimes conflicting identities. Its 1918 incarnation was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In 1945, it became the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. In both of those names, other Yugoslavs went unmentioned. But the civil war that destroyed the federation was fought in the name of Serbs, Croats, and a third group, whose anguish would haunt the news for years: Bosnian Muslims.

Among the many infamous metonyms — the fall of Vukovar, the massacre at Srebrenica, the rape camps — of this hideously personal conflict, in which neighbors violated each other’s daughters and cut their throats, the siege of Sarajevo remains prominent. When I think of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, I, who never got to see it before 1992, remember the double and triple thuds of shellfire, and then rushing down the almost empty streets, acutely conscious of my neck; tall blocks of buildings, so many broken windows; another row of apartments flecked with bullet holes; journalists paying 250 American dollars to fill a gas tank; soldiers laughing and ducking behind their sandbags, kept company by a woman who was grinding coffee by hand. Andrić’s secondary school was here, and most of Omer Pasha Latas is set either here or in other parts of Bosnia. How unquiet was it then? Remember that Sarajevo was the place where World War I began. But the windows were not always broken, and women ground coffee in peacetime as in war. Then as now, one would have felt the overwhelming influence of Bosnian Muslim tradition. And indeed, Omer Pasha Latas is set in the period of Ottoman rule, about which Andrić appears to have felt, to say the least, melancholy.

He did not live to see the civil war. But during World War II, while he novelized in seclusion, other ethnic massacres of comparably sadistic cruelty had stained Bosnia. [1] Did he take a side? “I couldn’t tell you myself. I’ve always felt Yugoslav.”

From 1463 until 1878, Bosnia was a conquered province of the Turkish Empire, during which time, according to the historian Noel Malcolm, “the main basis of hostility was not ethnic or religious but economic: the resentment felt by the members of a mainly (but not exclusively) Christian peasantry towards their Muslim landowners.” In any event, the previous sentence contains two terms that though not ethnic were in the context nonetheless opposed: Christians and Muslims. In the 1990s, I frequently heard Serbs and Croats harp back on what had become the bad old days, referring to Bosnian Muslims as “Turks.” But was that just war propaganda? Even in Andrić’s “A Letter from 1920” we read: “Bosnia is a country of hatred and fear.”

So. “What do you feel like, a Croat or a Serb?” Why did Djilas not ask “a Croat, a Serb, or a Bosnian”? Indeed, Lovett F. Edwards, the translator of Andrić’s most famous book, The Bridge on the Drina, into English, assures us in his foreword to it that the author is “himself a Serb and a Bosnian.” (Incidentally, the title page of my 1977 copy reads: “Translated from the Serbo-Croat.”)

Why was this third sort of Yugoslav so effaced yet so visible in Yugoslavia itself? (In 1992, a Croatian Muslim assured me: “It was only the Serbs trying to dominate us who forced us into one country.”) Why did the ostensibly progressive Djilas call his language Serbian, not Serbo-Croatian? If you ask a group of ex-Yugoslavs about these matters, you will receive a discouraging plenitude of answers. But as you read Omer Pasha Latas, I urge you to keep wondering and guessing, for this novel is a hoard of shining questions.

Ivo Andrić was born on October 10, 1892 — almost exactly a century before the civil war. At this point Bosnia’s overlords were the Austro-Hungarians, whose architecture still colors Sarajevo. His birthplace was Dolac, “now in Yugoslavia” (the latter according to the 1976 edition of my Encyclopaedia Britannica). Or, if you prefer a slightly different dateline, he was “born in Travnik, Bosnia, on 9th October 1892.” That place also figures in his novels. What that region was like during his childhood I, who was never there before 1992, cannot imagine, but an English observer from 1897 has left us the following highly significant remark on Christian-Muslim relations in Bosnia: “It is strange that they should bear so little hatred to their former oppressors, and the explanation lies probably in the fact that they were all of the same race.”

More necessary but insufficient desiderata: He went to school in Sarajevo, and also in Višegrad, the setting of The Bridge on the Drina. From 1919 until 1941, he was a diplomat. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961 and died on March 13, 1975, in Beograd, which was first the capital of Yugoslavia and then the capital of the Serbian Republic. As one post–civil war Serbian edition of his selected short stories complacently remarks, “his Belgrade funeral was attended by 10,000 people.” Back to the Britannica: “It was his native province, with its wealth of ethnic types, that provided the themes and psychological studies to be found in his works.”

In Malcolm’s history of Bosnia, we read that sometime around 1907 to 1910, the young man “presided over” a student group called “the Croat-Serb or Serb-Croat or Yugoslav Progressive Movement.” In name, at least, this hardly sounds Greater Serbian. But neither does it sound Bosniak. Nor does it have an Austro-Hungarian ring. The translator of The Bridge on the Drina writes: “As other gifted students of his race and time, and as his own students in The Bridge on the Drina, he belonged to the National Revolutionary Youth Organization, and experienced the customary cycle of persecution and arrest.” The Britannica works in this episode equally blandly: “His reputation was established with Ex Ponto (1918), a contemplative, lyrical prose work written during his internment by Austro-Hungarian authorities for nationalistic political activities during World War I.” Meanwhile, continuing to claim him as a native son, that Serbian edition of stories recounts the same event thus: “He was imprisoned for three years during World War I for his involvement in the Young Bosnia Movement which was implicated in the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo.” I have been told that the archduke’s killer, Gavrilo Princip, yearned for Greater Serbia. Or did he? Princip has also been called a “Slav nationalist,” which may or may not be the same thing. In Sarajevo, the commemoration simply reads: “Here, in this historic spot, Gavrilo Princip was the initiator of Liberty on the day of St. Vitus, the 28th of June, 1914.”

At any rate, Andrić, along with many others, was arrested almost immediately after the assassination and kept on ice until the general amnesty of 1917. Two years later, as I said, he entered the diplomatic service.

In 1924, he received his doctorate in the Austrian city of Graz. (Per Lovett Edwards, “Of a poor artisan family, he made his way largely through his own ability.”) His thesis evaluated “The Development of the Spiritual Life of Bosnia Under the Influence of Turkish Sovereignty.” What conclusions did it come to? The introduction to that 1977 printing of The Bridge on the Drina contents itself by blandly asserting that “the solid and precise information that underlies” the novel “was thus systemically built up through academic study.” But Malcolm’s history of Bosnia (published in 1994) labels the work “an expression of blind prejudice,” in evidence of which we are given this unfortunate sentence: “The influence of Turkish rule in Bosnia was absolutely negative.”

The reporter Fouad Ajami, who visited Yugoslavia’s bleeding ground in the same year, quoted the same sentence in evidence of Andrić’s “great dread of Islam in the Balkans, his allergy to the four centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia.” (By then a commander of Sarajevo irregulars had assured me: “They’re only terrorists now. They were Serbs. Now they’re not Serbs. There are no more legitimate Serbs.”) Meanwhile, Ajami compounded the accusation: “He was anxious to cover up his tracks. […] [He] had been ambassador of (Royal) Yugoslavia to the Third Reich at the time of the signing of the Tripartite Pact; and he was there in Vienna in March 1941, when Yugoslavia capitulated and joined the Axis powers.”

The unfairness of blaming Andrić for being Yugoslavia’s representative to Berlin is obvious. Someone had to try, however vainly, to delay or mitigate the forthcoming oppression, when, as Drina’s translator puts it, “Yugoslavia was desperately playing for time, hoping to postpone the invasion of Hitler and at the same time consolidate her forces to resist it when it inevitably came. I recall waiting tensely in Belgrade for Dr. Andrić to return from Berlin, the one sure sign that an invasion was immediate. He came back only a few hours before the first bombs fell on Belgrade.”

I do grant that “he was anxious to cover up his tracks.” Not only had he treated with Berlin; he’d also stood in for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, whose memory could not but be obnoxious to the Titoists. In 1951, when a certain government-sponsored historical exhibition was about to open, Andrić learned that among other items would be a photograph of the signing of the Tripartite Pact, in which he could be seen “straight and tall, in full dress, in all his majesty,” right behind the Third Reich’s bullying plenipotentiary Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would meet the noose at Nuremberg for his part in Nazi war crimes. (About the pact we read: “Hitler’s bribe [to Yugoslavia] was the offer of Salonika, and it was taken.”) And so the anxious Andrić of 1951 entreated Djilas, “with a bitter, even savage, twist to his lips,” to be cut out of the picture. Djilas picked up the phone, and the army obligingly excised the entire photo. Had the novelist been a fascist collaborator, the Titoists would surely have stood him against a wall. On the contrary, Djilas remarks that in 1945, “I admired Andrić’s steadfast refusal to deal on any terms with Nedrić’s Quisling regime.”

And so I would discount a footnoted rumor, which “may simply have been propaganda,” that in 1944 “several Serbian writers, including Ivo Andrić […] were ready to join the Chetniks in the mountains.” These latter were anticommunist insurgents, who soon decided that Tito’s bunch were worse than the Nazis, with whom they accordingly made local devil’s deals. The Allies withdrew support, and at the end of the war, the Chetniks’ leader was shot in Belgrade. These would not have been comfortable companions for our tactful, cautious, lanky diplomat.

Why those innuendoes against him? Given the complex antipathies of the Balkans, was it enough to be hated that he was a great writer? Did his comment that “the influence of Turkish rule in Bosnia was absolutely negative” sufficiently damn him? Did his novels bear a discernible anti-Muslim taint? Or was there more to criticize?

Some years after saving Andrić from his embarrassment about the Tripartite Pact, Djilas began openly disagreeing with Tito. Having resigned from the party, with prison and loss of civil rights on the horizon, he asked Andrić for a professional reading of his memoir of Montenegrin childhood, Land Without Justice (which, like his better-known Wartime, I strongly recommend). Andrić replied: “It’s awkward for me […] I’m a party member.” One may well infer a trace of ordinary human resentment in the rejected party’s summation: “As far as I know, he never harmed a soul, though I cannot boast of his having done anyone any good either…”

10.

In its entry on Yugoslavia, the 1976 Britannica concludes: “There are […] only two really major contemporary figures: Ivo Andrić, the Nobel Prize winner in 1961, is a prose master — best known for his Bridge on the Drina (1945) — whose works, as the Nobel committee noted, have been characterized by ‘epic force,’ great compassion, and clarity of style. The other is Miroslav Krleža, a satirist whose [works] […] foreshadow the themes of modern existentialism.”

Djilas again: “Andrić liked living and working in peace. […] His [official] greetings and toasts were far more flattering than Krleža’s, precisely because Andrić was an alien fitting himself into a new situation […] Andrić was simply an opportunist — but not a simple opportunist.”

11.

Yes, he must have been an alien, for his characters are conspicuous in their alienage. Consider, for instance, in Drina, the Christian boy from Višegrad who in 1516 was wrested from his parents for the Turkish “tribute of blood,” and thus “changed his way of life, his faith, his name and his country.” In short, he grew into an alien opportunist — and eventually became one of the sultan’s great viziers. All the while he never escaped a “black pain which cut into his breast with that special well-known childhood pang.” And so he brought into being the eponymous bridge on the Drina to serve his lost home at Višegrad.

To be an alien is to live between — and one longish pre–civil war (1974) history of the Habsburg Empire considers that Andrić “represents a bridge between imperial and royal Habsburg and future Yugoslav Bosnia. Although he portrayed the imperial administration of Bosnia with great sensitivity and knowledge, he […] [was] outwardly directed toward Serbia.” It might be equally appropriate to call him inwardly directed toward the Ottoman culture of his childhood. Let us temporarily set aside his hypothetical political sympathies and consider him as the great literary master that he is.

Faulkner could utter foolish provocations about race war, but only an ideologue would therefore dismiss his magnificent novels and stories about the tragically echoing ambiguities of race relations in the Deep South. Indeed, Andrić’s more slender corpus is as complex and subtle as Faulkner’s. To my mind, his supreme achievement is the understated Bosnian Chronicle, but the more crowd-pleasing Drina likewise veils his reductionist “absolutely negative” judgment of the Ottomans in a brilliant-colored web of nuance. Whatever one might think of the long Turkish occupation of Bosnia, with its gifts and cruelties, nuance positively shines in the novel’s central device: the vicissitudes of that vizier’s bridge and the generations it served. “This hard and long building process was for them [the Višegrad people] a foreign task undertaken at another’s expense. Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the creation of a real, skillfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew to weave and remember.” No “absolutely negative” here!

12.

But by now it should be clear that Omer Pasha Latas will be no paean to the Ottoman period. In the very first pages, when our eponymous protagonist comes to Sarajevo in 1850 to implement certain moderately progressive reforms at whatever cost to the local Muslim gentry, “The procession […] was truly impressive and intimidating, but somehow overdone. In front of it and behind it, to the right and left of it, stretched the deprivation of a poor harvest and a hungry spring, the bleakness of crooked, puddle-filled alleys, dilapidated eaves and long unpainted houses, the poorly dressed people and their anxious faces.”

But unlike the vizier of Drina, Omer Pasha, who began his life utterly beyond the Ottoman pale, voluntarily defects to the Turkish Empire. Almost right away “he found good, warmhearted people,” and upon their advice he converts to Islam.

As it happens, there was a real “Omer-paša Latas[,] [b]orn Michael Lattas,” whom Malcolm’s history describes as “one of the most effective and intelligent governors [Bosnia] ever had in this last century of Ottoman rule,” and who implemented certain reforms to the benefit of the Christian minority. In Andrić’s portrayal you will find little testimony of his effectiveness, and even less of his arguable benignity. He is, in a word, lost.

If warmhearted people are less in evidence in Omer Pasha than they might be (Andrić specializes in the envious, the jealous, the lovesick, and above all the disappointed), localism and syncretism remain his affectionate obsessions. One of this novel’s many briefly yet elegantly sketched characters is the eastern Bosnian village headman Knez Bogdan Zimonjić, whose massively silent obstinacy holds its own against Omer Pasha’s seduction and threats. The unpleasant Omer Pasha himself (“I will reduce your entire Bosnia to rubble, so no one will know who is a bey and who an aga”) contains multitudes: for instance, the failed father of his Austrian past, his unhappy wife (another former Christian), and the “traitors’ unit” of kindred converts, with whom he operates in exquisitely delineated uneasy dependence.

“Most were despairing vagrants who had lost one homeland and not found another, damaged by life among strangers, with burned bridges behind them […] condemned to being loyal soldiers because they had nowhere to go” — call them fragmentary fictive representations of a certain post-1945 Dr. Ivo Andrić.

And so let me now quote another war reporter, Aleksa Djilas, writing in the gruesome year 1992: “Though he came from a Croatian family in Bosnia” — I pause to remind you of the claim that “Dr. Ivo Andrić is himself a Serb and a Bosnian” — “Andrić considered himself a Yugoslav — a nationality that encompassed identities of all the different Yugoslav groups. […] [He] believed only a general acceptance of such a Yugoslav identity within a common state could put an end to the ancient conflicts among various Yugoslav groups.” Whether or not the last sentence is a stretch, I believe that Andrić’s literary project is indeed the noble one of encompassing all the identities he knew.

13.

Who and what, then, was an Ottoman, a Muslim, an occupier, a person of the third sort? “Knowing that to be a true Turk meant being naturally hard, haughty, basically cold and unyielding,” the fictive Omer Pasha does his best to live up to this stereotype, but one hallmark of Andrić’s genius is that as we read him we keep wondering about the problematic nature of all identities, let alone assumed ones. Consider this telling observation from the viewpoint of the procurer Ahmet Aga: Omer Pasha “was beginning to lose his sense of proportion, to forget not only what was permissible and natural and what was not, but also what he himself really wanted and could do and what he could not.” That goes for most of the novel’s characters, from the man who loses his sanity after a love-inflaming glimpse of a strange woman, to Omer Pasha’s irresolute and undistinguished brother, whom the great man advises to consider suicide.

And so we should read Andrić with due regard for ambiguity and irony. There are Turks and Turkish masks. When the Croatian-born, European-trained painter Karas, having received a commission to paint Omer Pasha, enters the empire, “the first Turkish junior officer who had examined his passport at the border, though barely able to read, had worn […] a cold, repellent mask. […] And it was the same everywhere.” If you like, take such passages as nail-in-the-coffin proofs of (requoting Ajami) this author’s “great dread of Islam in the Balkans.” But Omer Pasha, the strict cold Turk, is not a Turk. And Karas, a non-Muslim failure wherever he goes, takes comfort in bigoted resentment.

14.

In this strange novel there comes no resolution, if only because the book remained unfinished at the time of Andrić’s death; the bitter epiphanies of minor characters shed but glancing flickers upon the impermeable solitude of Omer Pasha himself, who at the end departs for unknown places with us none the wiser as to his mission’s practical accomplishments. How life will devolve for his raging wife, and whether Karas’s portrait ever turned out well, of these and other matters we are left ignorant.

Omer Pasha Latas consists less of sequential chapters than of vignettes, which in Drina would have transformed themselves into tales out of the folk tradition, and even here sometimes blossom into magical realism, as in the case of a certain Kostake Nenishanu, maître d’hotel of Omer Pasha’s entourage, who unavailingly pursues and finally murders a Christian prostitute: “the story of his crime […] spread in different directions and to a different rhythm, to grow and branch out, present everywhere but invisible as an underground stream,” serving the superficially opposed purposes of wish compensation and didactic morality tale — the more so as they diverge from actuality. Not only does this passage give a tolerable idea of Andrić’s art; it also stands in for alienation’s beautiful escapist dreams. The novel’s characters cannot understand each other or even themselves.

One might say, this is surely the human condition … but then new passages hammer away at the Turks, until it grows more difficult to reject Ajami’s interpretation of Andrić’s politics — difficult, but not impossible.

It is hardly unreasonable to see Bosnia, as Andrić did in Omer Pasha, as “a society where there have long been disorder, violence and abuse.” And at times, certainly in the 1990s and the 1940s, maybe in 1850–1851 when the novel is set, “people could be divided,” as he upliftingly put it, “into three groups, unequal in size, but sharing the same wretchedness: prisoners, those who pursued and guarded them and silent, impotent onlookers.” These observations ring true, but not eternal. And so readers must decide for themselves whether or not Omer Pasha Latas contains bigotry. Perhaps the best compliment they could pay it would be to delve into Bosnian history.

15.

As for “that Serb or Croat (take your pick) monstre sacré Ivo Andrić,” (in the words of Danilo Kiš, another great writer from the region) let me leave you with one last assessment from Djilas: “In Andrić’s cautious and quiet reserve there was something hard and unyielding, even bitter, which any threat to the deeper currents of his life would have encountered. […] In his deepest and most creative self, Andrić tried to live outside finite time.” Good communists could hardly approve of that! And indeed, Djilas went on to insist that “somehow, everyone must pay his debt to his times.” However, he ended the sentence as follows, either to soften the disparagement of Andrić or because he was now considering his own darkening situation: “But the wise man thinks his own thoughts and does things his own way.”

Andrić did pay his debt to his times. He wrote about what formed him. His bitterness was sincere, his descriptions beautiful. Meanwhile, like Omer Pasha, he thought his own thoughts, leaving us with haunting sentences and difficult questions.

William T. Vollmann is the author of three collections of stories, more than ten novels, and many more volumes of nonfiction. His novel Europe Central won the National Book Award in 2005, and he has won the Whiting Foundation Award and the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award for his fiction. In 2018, he published a two-volume investigation into climate change, Carbon Ideologies.

[1] Readers should be warned that my attempt to express narrative continuity in regard to Bosnia’s multiple tragedies may be controversial or even offensive. Many accounts take the position that the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s was a unique event, like the Holocaust, and that it would not have happened without its Serbian instigators. “The biggest obstacle to all understanding of the conflict [in Bosnia of 1992–1993] is the assumption that what has happened […] is the product […] of forces lying within Bosnia’s own internal history. This is the myth which was carefully propagated by those who caused the conflict.” (Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History). All I can say is that books written in and about (for instance) the 1940s are sufficiently replete with gruesome slaughters for the greater glory of this creed or that ethnicity as to make me uncomfortable with this reductionist position. If my own conflation (or, if you like, misunderstanding) causes pain to anyone, I am sincerely sorry.

The post The Turk and the Diplomat: An Introduction to Ivo Andrić’s “Omer Pasha Latas” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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