The Book of Blam

Starred review from September 28, 1998
One morning in 1942, in the Serbian town of Novi Sad, Vilim Blam and his wife, Blanka, are visited by a detachment of the Hungarian Arrow Cross; although their papers are in order, the soldiers walk the old Jewish couple down the street and machine gun them alongside 1400 others. The events of that raid, recounted with a cool detachment that paradoxically heightens the horror, are the historical facts around which Tisma has produced a complicated narrative of infinite regret. Their son Miroslav, the novel's protagonist, survives because he is protected by the wonderfully ambiguous Propadic, his mother's erstwhile lover and the man who takes over Vilim's post as a reporter at the Novi Sad paper after Vilim is fired for being a Jew. 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. Except for the fact of the massacre, this could be Svevo's Trieste, or a provincial town in a Chekhov story. Miroslav is that familiar creation of the great middle European writers, the city intellectual whose whole bourgeois existence is devoted to making up his mind. 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. (Nov.) FYI: The Book of Blam is the third book to appear in English from Tisma's "pentateuch" of Novi Sad novels, including Kapo and The Use of Man.