Description - Omer Pasha Latas by Celia Hawkesworth
Sarajevo, 1850. It is the story of Omer Pasha Latas, born Mihailo Latas into a Serbian Orthodox family living on the eastern edge of the Hapsburg empire. When Mihailo's chances of a military career in Austria fail, he flees across the border into Ottoman Bosnia. He 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, in the year 1850 the Sultan sends Omer Pasha to Bosnia 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, Andric portrays a man at once supremely arrogant and pitifully vulnerable, and a city in the grip of fear.
A sweeping epic by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andrić about power, identity, and Islam set in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia and Istanbul.
Omer Pasha Latas is set in nineteenth-century Sarajevo, where Muslims and Christians live in uneasy proximity while entertaining a common resentment of faraway Ottoman rule. Omer is the seraskier, commander in chief of the Sultan's armies, and as the book begins he arrives from Istanbul, dispatched to bring Sarajevo's landowners to heel, a task that he accomplishes with his usual ferocity and efficiency. And yet the seraskier's expedition to Bosnia is a time of reckoning for him as well- he was born in the Balkans, a Serb and a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bright boy who escaped his father's financial disgrace by running away and converting to Islam. Now, at the height of his power, he heads an army of misfits, adventurers, and outcasts from across Europe and Asia, and yet wherever he goes he remains a stranger.
Ivo Andrić, who won the Nobel Prize in 1961, is a spellbinding storyteller and a magnificent stylist, and here, in his final novel, he surrounds his enigmatic central figure with many vivid and fascinating minor characters, lost souls and hopeless dreamers all, in a world that is slowly sliding towards disaster. Omer Pasha Latas combines the leisurely melancholy of Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March with the stark fatalism of an old ballad.
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