The Book of Blam
  • Published: 15 February 2016
  • ISBN: 9781590179208
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 248
  • RRP: $39.99
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The Book of Blam

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Part of Aleksandar Tisma's lauded Novi Sad Trilogy, The Book of Blam is a classic of Holocaust literature and a searing portrait of what it means to survive. Tisma's antihero is a Job untouched by grace, a man who lives but who has lost everything in the process, and it is his unwavering perpsective that makes Tisma's novel tremendously important.

The Book of Blam, Aleksandar Tišma’s “extended kaddish . . . [his] masterpiece” (Kirkus Reviews), is a modern-day retelling of the book of Job. The war is over. Miroslav Blam walks along the former Jew Street, and he remembers. He remembers Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; and Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; and Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; and Arthur Spitzer, a grocer, who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a lawyer who was a Communist. All dead. As are his younger sister and his best friend, a Serb, both of whom joined the resistance movement; and his mother and father in the infamous Novi Sad raid in January 1942—when the Hungarian Arrow Cross executed 1,400 Jews and Serbs on the banks of the Danube and tossed them into the river.

Blam lives. The war he survived will never be over for him.
  • Published: 15 February 2016
  • ISBN: 9781590179208
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 248
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

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Praise for The Book of Blam

"One of the most stirring novels to come from the Balkans." --Larry Wolff, The New York Times

"A startling, extraordinary creation." --The New Yorker

"A Balkan bible presided over by an ironic vision of the imagination, capable of envisioning utter barbarity but not the expiation for sins." --The Boston Globe

"Tišma is unrelenting in his quest for truth yet compassionate in his judgments of individuals." -- The Wall Street Journal

"Tisma has made Novi Sad a microcosm for the most painful developments of 20th-century history. It is a city of tiers, one tier the actual city in which Miroslav survives, the other filled by the possible lives of those who perished. Yet life on the edge of the abyss is surprisingly normal. ... The intersection of this high intellectual refinement with the most brutal incidents in history gives the novel, which has been published to acclaim in France and Germany, its great, eccentric pathos." -- Publishers Weekly

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