[In the following review, Lord provides a laudatory assessment of The Pasha's Concubine and Other Stories]

The volume opens with "The Bridge on the Zepa," a haunting story of the building of a bridge in Bosnia, of a powerful but shadowy vizier, and of a demonic Italian master builder. One notes here, as in all his work, that Andrić's chief concern is with the thoughts and feelings of people; history, social as well as political, is a background for the individual and his psychology.

The second story, "The Journey of Ali Djerzelez," is pure Bosnian and pure Andrić. Its protagonist is one of the epic heroes of the Bosnian Muslims. Unfortunately, no footnote identifies him for the English reader, who thus misses the satire and some of the pathos in Andrić's portrayal of the legendary figure as ugly, lecherous, stupid, and ridiculous, a man who yearns for the embrace of a foreign beauty but is at home only in the arms of the local prostitute.

Ali Djerzelez may be obsessed with women, but he is not mad. Mullah Yusuf of "In the Camp," written a few years later (1922), is a sex maniac. And Mustapha Magyar, the war hero of the story that bears his name (written in 1923) is so guilt-ridden because of a sex crime he witnessed that he becomes murderously insane. In these stories Andrić explored the depths of obsessive sex and violence.

The title story, "The Pasha's Concubine," is a study of the effect of the feeling of guilt on a weak and oversensitive young girl who is taken from her father's bakery to be the concubine of Veli Pasha, the commander in chief of Turkish forces in Bosnia. Ostracized by the Christian community, after Veli Pasha's recall to Istanbul she is made a servant to a rich but secretly degenerate family. Andrić has a fondness for the rejected.

A few stories in this volume would be better understood were the reader familiar with other tales as yet untranslated. "Confession" and "By the Brandy Still are the last in a sequence concerning Fra Marko Krneta, monk extraordinary. And "Confession" is a companion piece to an earlier story in which Fra Marko tries to convert a dying Turk, and which lends it a special poignancy. The bandit who refuses confession is a counterpart to the Turk who spat upon the cross. Moreover, in the earlier tale Andrić introduced the Turk Kezmo, who is present at the death of Fra Marko; there is even verbal interplay between that story and "By the Brandy Still."

"The Scythe," also part of a series, is seemingly sentimental, but this is not a characteristic of Andrić's works. Here again, to do the story justice one must read it as part of its group. In the others the protagonist, the peasant Vitomir, quarrels callously with his sick wife, and is relieved when, returning from the market, he learns that she is dead. Andrić did not romanticize his peasants.

Two of the selections in this volume demonstrate the impact of Bosnia on foreigners, especially "civilized" Westerners, a subject that found its fullest expression in the richest of Andric's novels, Bosnian Chronicle. In "Thirst" a captured bandit is deprived of water to make him disclose the whereabouts of his comrades. The Western wife of the gendarme in charge of the interrogation, in bed with her husband, listens to the bandit begging for water in the cellar below their room. At dawn, when it seems she can no longer stand the wounded man's suffering and must complain, her husband turns to her, and she is overcome by another thirst. In "The Snake" Bosnia seems even more savage because the land and its superstitious inhabitants are viewed through the eyes of two young Viennese ladies. When a little peasant girl is bitten by a viper everyone is powerless to help her; the horror of the Viennese girls, intensified because the incident is so unspectacular, is nearly unbearable. This unpretentious piece is one of Andric's most powerful stories.

"Bar Titanic" is a masterpiece of irony. Its scene is Sarajevo during World War II, at the moment when the Ustashas began to terrorize the Jewish population. The Bar Titanic is a wretched place in the poorest part of the city, frequented by alcoholics and outcasts. Its proprietor, Mento Papo, has been rejected by the Jewish community because of his drunkenness and depravity. He is terrified when a Ustasha comes to seize his nonexistent wealth. The Ustasha, also an outcast, does not realize he has been given this particular Jew as a joke.

"Woman on the Rock" and "A Summer in the South" are the only non-Bosnian stories in the book. In the first a beautiful opera singer in her late forties, sunning herself on a rock by the sea and struggling against the reality of aging, recalls in reverie images of her awakening body as a girl. "A Summer in the South" carries dream to its ultimate. A Viennese professor, on vacation in a small seaside resort in Dalmatia, sees as he sits over the galley proofs of his monograph on Philip II a man with the face of that worthy beckoning him up the mountain. One day he follows, until "he became momentum itself, and in the momentum was his whole existence." This is perhaps Andric's one story of real fantasy, and it is beautifully told. In its quiet, almost puckish way the tale is the culmination of the reveries of many of his characters, from Djerzelez and Fra Marko to the "Woman on the Rock."

I have discussed the prewar stories in the order in which they were written (except for the opening one). The arrangement in this book stresses variety and produces an exciting volume in its own right. Joseph Hitrec's translations, although occasionally taking too much liberty with the original, have literary merit in themselves.

Ivo Andrić's tales are closely knit and his style is taut. He is like the ancient seer mediating between two worlds. The struggles of which he writes are elemental—man against mortality and his own failings. Here, as in the myths of antiquity, man, to be at peace, must reconcile himself to reality; when he does not his death is, as it must be, ironic.