Re: Ivo Andric


"Phyllis Chamberlain" <phchbn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:rkfsf.5106$X86.4839@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Here's an author for compulsive interpreters. A friend recently suggested I
> read "A Bridge over the River Drina" by Ivo Andric (there's an accent over the
> final "c" for pronunciation "--ischt"). Andric turns out to be the 1961 Nobel
> Prize winner.

Yeah, I've read him. His short stories are wry and a little folksy.
He was famous in the former Yugoslavia for calling himself both
Serbian and Croatian, which is to say, liberal and nonsecular.
I sort of discovered him when I was looking around for a unifying
theme in how the Nobel laureate in literature is selected.

Who he reminds me of is Gottfried Keller whose
vignettes of the people of the mythical Swiss village
of Seldwyla are collected in "Die Leute von Seldwyla."

(With respect to Keller - I don't think there is a translation into
English, but it is written in standard German rather than, as one
might suppose, the uncomprehensible Swiss dialect.)






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