New York Review Books, Belletristik, The Use of Man (Englisch, Aleksandar Tisma, 2014)

Aleksandar Ti&scaron ma (1924&ndash 2003) was born in the Vojvodina, a former province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had been incorporated into the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the First World War. His father, a Serb, came from a peasant background his mother was middle-class and Jewish. The family lived comfortably, and Ti&scaron ma received a good education. In 1941, Hungary annexed Vojvodina the next year&mdash Ti&scaron ma&rsquo s last in high school&mdash the regime carried out a series of murderous pogroms, killing some 3,000 inhabitants, primarily Serbs and Jews, though the Ti&scaron mas were spared. After fighting for the Yugoslav partisans, Ti&scaron ma studied philosophy at Belgrade University and went into journalism and in 1949 joined the editorial staff of a publishing house, where he remained until his retirement in 1980. Ti&scaron ma published his first story, &ldquo Ibika&rsquo s House,&rdquo in 1951 it was followed by the novels Guilt and In Search of the Dark Girl and a collection of stories, Violence. In the 1970s and &rsquo 80s, he gained international recognition with the publication of his Novi Sad trilogy: The Book of Blam (1971), about a survivor of the Hungarian occupation of Novi Sad The Use of Man (1976), which follows a group of friends through the Second World War and after and Kapo (1987), the story of a Jew raised as a Catholic who becomes a guard in a German concentration camp. Ti&scaron ma moved to France after the outbreak of war and collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but in 1995 he returned to Novi Sad, where he spent his last years. Bernard Johnson (1933&ndash 2003) was affiliated with the Language Centre at the London School of Economics for many years. In 1970 he edited and translated the first anthology of modern Yugoslav literature, and throughout his career he distinguished himself as one of the most active translators of Serbo-Croatian poetry and prose working in English. Claire Messud is the author of four novels and a book of novellas. Her novel The Emperor&rsquo s Children was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and was selected as one of the ten best books of 2006 by The New York Times. Her most recent novel is The Woman Upstairs. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.