The Use of Man by Aleksandar Tisma

Vera mourned everyone who had ever spoken to her, who had longed for her, whether out of love or lust, even the German soldiers whose convulsive spasms on top of her before they left for the front were the last expression of their will to live. They were all shadows now, voices from the past. Was there anything solid on this earth, anything that stood firm, so one would not need to say of it: That, too, has passed? It seemed to her that there was nothing. Desires, plans, people sending their calls of love and screams of pain into the air, and ultimately all this dissolved into a fog that floated aimlessly. And she herself was a wisp in that fog, lost among strange shadows and voices. Did she exist, or was she just another of those shadows and voices?

Sredoje Lazukic returns to his hometown of Novi Sad in Serbia as a member of the victorious Partisans at the end of World War II. His former home is occupied, but the home of his old friend and crush Vera Kroner stands empty. Wandering in, he finds a strange object: a little red book, a diary that once belonged to Fraulein Anna, who taught them both German, and who died young of illness before the war began. This object brings Sredoje back to the life he once had as a boy, and to the lives of others: Vera, a beautiful and aloof half-Jewish girl, her boyfriend, Sredoje's friend, Milinko, who ended his days armless, legless, deaf, and blind in a field hospital, to their various parents and siblings, killed in war or in camps, or simply absent.

Structurally, The Use of Man is a wonder: it vaults from the era before the war to the era after, to the war itself, from Sredoje to Vera to Milinko to Fraulein Anna to Vera's father to Sredoje's brother, and on, and on. It's one of those books that seems to have no organizing principle but intuition, and an intuition that works flawlessly. Although, now that I've said that, I think there's perhaps one organizing principle: it keeps until the very end the story of Vera's experience in the concentration camp, where she was spared a quick death by being selected for a special block in which the German officers kept the women they wanted to sleep with. Even then, she outlives most of the other girls, who are tortured to death when the officers tire of them, or over petty slights. When we read this section--recounted in pitilessly toneless fashion, like the tale of a dead and numbed psyche--we begin to understand why Vera, having returned to Novi Sad, submits sexually to any man who darkens her door; it is the rote mechanical movement of someone whose life has been emptied out of everything but this horrible routine.

Sex is a big part of The Use of Man. It ought to be called The Use of Women, honestly. Vera's trials are mirrored by Sredoje's sexual sadism, Sredoje who only ends up with the anti-occupation Partisans because he's chased out of the Serbian police force for abusing the power of his badge by threatening to arrest prostitutes unless they service him for free. Despite this, Sredoje and Vera are the twin poles of the novel, destined for each other as much as they are foils for one another. When they finally re-meet, years after the war's end, Sredoje is in possession of the diary that was given to Vera by the dying Fraulein. They kindle a brief romantic and sexual relationship centered around it, reading and re-reading it, dumbfounded by a relic of despair recorded by someone who never even saw the war's beginning. Was it better to die, like Fraulein Anna, of some strange disease, than to live through the war's ravagings?

The way in which the war upended lives is the novel's big theme. To make it work, Tisma lingers for a hundred pages on the pre-war lives of the characters in Novi Sad, not without their conflicts and complexities, but somehow, like Anna's, conflicts and complexities of a different tenor and scope completely. The book's structural tricks give this prelude a sense of foreboding and doom; Tisma sets aside one chapter to tell us, paragraph by paragraph, how each of the characters will die, which by gas chamber, which by bullets, which by suicide. The war is a knot into which time enters in both directions. It gives a sense, too, of how the ethnic and cultural complexities of the Balkans exacerbated the war's uncertainty. How does Vera's father, the Jewish Kroner, end up with his brother-in-law Sep, a dedicated anti-Semite and Nazi, staying in his house? This could be merely a preconceived notion, and much of Europe must have been the same way, but something in The Use of Man reflected the flammable ethnic and cultural conflicts that have dogged the Balkans forever.

The Use of Man sounds like a too-familiar book: a Holocaust story in a realist mode. Who needs another book like that? It makes it all the more impressive, I think, that the book is so engaging and affecting; though the structure is clever and skillful, it's the richness of the characters and the detail of their lives that makes the novel what it is.

With the addition of Serbia, my "countries read" list is up to 63.