Translated by Edward Dennis Goy and Jasna Levingerī+ : effective and generous (though bleak) novelĪ powerful book, and especially resonant in this time.General information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author But everything has a price and so does our love for what we are stuck with.Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs. The greatest misery is that we grew fond of this dead end we are mired in and do not want to abandon it. We wanted to preserve ourselves, and that is exactly how we lost the knowledge of our identity. Both our brethren and the newcomers despise us, and we defend ourselves with our pride and our hatred. With an unclear feeling of shame about our ancestry and guilt about our renegade status, we do not want to look into the past, but there is no future to look into we therefore try to stop the time, terrified with the prospect of whatever solution might come about. As a dead-end branch that streamed away from mother river has neither flow, nor confluence it can rejoin, we are too small to be a lake, too big to be sapped by the earth. We stopped half way through, flabbergasted. Only yesterday we were something that we now wish to forget, yet we have become nothing else. No one is such a joke of history as we are. So what are we? Fools? Miserable wretches? The most complex people in the world. Meša Selimović, book Death and the Dervish Crude force has worn us out and we made a virtue out of a necessity: we grew smart out of spite.“ Waves of history strike us as a sea cliff. We live on a divide between worlds, at the border between nations, always at a fault to someone and first to be struck. We remain the saddest little district of the world, the most miserable people of the world, losing our own persona and nor being able to take on anyone else's, torn away and not accepted, alien to all and everyone, including those with whom we are most closely related, but who will not recognise us as their kin. Is it a wonder then that we are poor? For centuries now we have been seeking our true selves, yet soon we will not know who we are, we will forget that we ever wanted anything others do us the honour of calling us under their banner for we have none, they lure us when we are needed and discard us when we have outserved the purpose they gave us. „Translated: We are no one's, always at a boundary, always someone’s dowry.

Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović