num_pages: 120
description: Prokleta avlija/The Damned Yard (Description from Ivo Andri Foundation website)The novel is written in 1954. amil a wealthy young man of Smyrna living in the last years of the Ottoman Empire is fascinated by the story of Dem ill-fated brother of the Sultan Bajazet who ruled Turkey in the fifteenth century. amil in his isolation comes to believe that he is Dem and that he shares his evil destiny: he is born to be a victim of the State. Because of his stories about Dems ambitions to overthrow his brother amil is arrested under suspicion of plotting against the Sultan. He is taken to a prison in Istanbul where he tells his story to Petar a monk.Out of these exotic materials Andri has constructed a book of great clarity brevity and interest. No doubt it will be read by some as a political parable about the tyranny of the State but also as a quite simply story about ill-fortune and human misunderstanding fear and ignorance. Dem and amil are doomed  and the certainty of their persecution is sometimes relieved sometimes intensified by the stupidity and fright of the people who cross their ill-starred lives.Construction takes up most of the books space: the central story of Dem as related by amil lasts only a chapter or two. For the rest of the time the reader strips layer off layer as one narrator passes him on the next. There is an interesting passage that helps to explain this method at the moment when amil starts narrating Dems story in the first person. I is a word we are told which fixes the position of the speaker in such a way that the exercise of will is no longer possible and the speaker strength is exceeded  strength presumably to break out of the identification that all his past actions and thoughts force upon him when he uses the word. I is both a confession and an imprisonment. The fact that the novel passes the reader on from one narrator to the next rather suggests that the author is taking constant evasive action lest he betray himself or his reader into the kind of personal confession which seals the fate of amil. What exactly this game of form flirting with meaning signifies must be left to the individual reader.The movement is centripetal towards Dems story and then disperses. Details within the story are made to mimic this form. Thus when Peter receives the message telling him of his impending release:Two younger prisoners...were chasing around using him as the centerpoint of ever narrowing circles. Annoyed he tried to break away from these exuberant youths when one of them brushed against him and he felt a folded scrap of paper thrust into his hand. The youths continued their chase but now in widening circles...The reader is led on just such a chase in the course of the novel. The effect of this is to make the plot seem more like a poetic image than an ordinary plot: capable therefore of as many meanings as are the images of an allusive poem. Yet the language is simple and direct not at all poetic. The characters are remarkable alive even in conversation. Karaoz the governor of the goal is a spidery authoritarian who loves to torment the charges he loves. The prisoners complained about the way one complains about ones life and curses ones destiny...it would have been hard for them to imagine life without him.The Devils Yard is justified as all symbolic and figurative novels must be by the extent to which it touches the emotions. It is extremely moving. Fear horror despair amusement at times  all these indicate that the threat of the meaning has been recognized.
language: None
title: Prokleta avlija
publisher: None