Bosnian Chronicle - Tapa blanda

Set in the town of Travnik, Bosnian Chronicle presents the struggle for supremacy in a region that stubbornly refuses to submit to any outsider. The time is Napoleonic and the novel, both in its historical scope and psychological subtlety, is Tolstoyan. Inevitably, in its portrayal of conflict and fierce ethnic loyalties, the story is eerily relevant to readers today.

Ottoman viziers, French consuls, and Austrian plenipotentiaries are consumed by a ceaseless game of diplomacy and double-dealing: expansive and courtly face-to-face, brooding and scheming behind closed doors. As they have for centuries, the Bosnians themselves observe and endure the machinations of greater powers that vie, futilely, to absorb them. Ivo Andric’s masterwork is imbued with the richness and complexity of a region that has brought much tragedy to our century and known so little peace.

Ivo Andirc was born in 1892 in Travnik, Bosnia, of Roman Catholic parents and grew up alongside Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Visegrad, the town on the river Drina in which his novel The Bridge Over Drina is set, and in Sarajevo. He studied at the Habsburg universities of Zagreb, Cracow, Vienna and Graz. A founding member of the first “Yugoslav” youth organisation in Bosnia, he was imprisoned in 1914 for his involvement in the “Young Bosnia” independence movement. He served in the Yugoslav diplomatic service until 1941 when he returned definitively to Belgrade. His first work appeared in 1914 and he published six volumes of short stories and five novels, as well as verse, essays and reflective prose. In 1961 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1975.