Omer Pasha Latas
By: Ivo Andrić ; translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth ; introduction by William T. Vollmann
Contributors: Hawkesworth, Celia, 1942- translator
Series: New York Review Books classics; New York Review Books classics
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 273
ISBN-13: 9781681372525
Subjects: Fiction
Work titles: Omerpaša Latas
Description: A sweeping epic by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andrić about power, identity, and Islam set in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia and Istanbul. This previously untranslated historical novel by the Nobel Prize-winner Andrić 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 Andrić portrays a man who is both supremely arrogant and pitifully vulnerable, and a city in the grip of fear.
Notes: Translation from the Serbo-Croatian of: Omerpaša Latas.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.