[In the following favorable review of The Pasha's Concubine and Other Stories, Simon lauds Andrić as "a master of the unspoken."]

Ivo Andrić is a master of the unspoken. Other writers may go further in giving expression to the ideas and cognitions of man. But whatever is dark and indefinable, too deep for psychologizing to label, is caught in Andrić's fictions—caught not the way a dead butterfly is pinned to our consciousness, but as some terrible beast is tracked to its lair, to be heard and occasionally glimpsed, but never handled and catalogued. If greatness can be in intimations and implications (and why can't it?). Andric is a great writer who must and will burst the bonds of the little-known language he writes in.

The Pasha's Concubine and Other Tales is the first generous selection in English from the Yugoslav Nobel Prize-winner's several volumes of short stories; and it is in his stories rather than in his novels that Andrić is at his best. For if there is one thing he cannot manage very well, it is sustained dialogue—a flaw that is perhaps related to his respect for certain unexplainables. What happens in these tales of Bosnia through centuries of occupation by Turks, Austrians, Germans verges on the Conradian sense of horror and the Joycean concentration on sudden revelations, epiphanies. But Andrić is his own man.

The main themes of these 13 tales are three. First, the prevalence of evil—a nameless evil which, though it has its outward manifestations, exceeds them into unknowable regions—and the way it affects various people: killing some, maddening others, and extracting from still others a baffled, aching endurance. Secondly, the strange interweaving of human destinies, whereby two remote and unconnected lives are brought into unexpected, disquieting contact with often uprooting and sometimes lethal consequences. Thirdly, the borderline conflicts where different cultures, epochs, ideologies meet and clash, the exasperating little tempests in a melting-pot that usher in global catastrophes. But the changes rung are infinite, and the narrative artistry buried discreetly and deep.

Of the many remarkable yet self-effacing techniques used, the most marvelous is the making of a shape out of shapelessness itself: very often what we most want to know about a character or event is not told us, the story being a jagged fragment torn out of a measureless fabric. But the very jaggedness and fragmentariness raise so many fundamental problems that we are fed more lavishly on this feast of eye-dilating, soul-distended questions and the bits of frazzled hypotheses that here and there cling to them, than on the customary planned, dietetic answers. The unsettling labyrinth of an Andrić story, always branching off into other, parallel or parenthetic stories, skipping over vital particulars while highlighting crazy details, and usually ending at anything but an end, has the effect of making the ordinary seem extraordinary and the extraordinary, ordinary. And of the oneness of those two is the world made.

But all that wouldn't be so powerful if Andrić did not know and make known his world with several equally consummate skills. This Bosnia—a place like no other on earth yet somehow containing them all—is anatomized in every detail of its topography, geology, history, eccentricity, appearance and essence. There is no foot of this land as it is or ever was; no face, personality, endeavor of any of its inhabitants, past or present—that Andrić does not know intimately, lovingly and uncannily. It is a cognition or intuition so absolute as to be almost frightening as it darts its aperçus into bull's-eye after bull's-eye and still remains respectful of ultimate mysteries.

The translator, Joseph Hitrec, is a genuine writer in English, and thus easily our best translator of Andric. Nevertheless, he has a tendency to embroider or conventionalize: thus "eyelids behind which there must have been many tears" becomes "eyelids behind which tears must have welled"; a silence "chipped at the edges" becomes "bruised peripherally." Sometimes he is a little careless, as when "flight without sound" becomes "flight of sound," and the "mighty" fears of childhood, "petty" ones. The rare linguistic lapses are almost never those of the foreign-born, as when an ocean liner turns into a "transoceanic ship"; rather, they are the almost unnoticeable ones of native writers, like the redundant "old crone." But more important are Hitrec's awareness of the need to re-create Serbo-Croatian cadences as well as meanings, and his frequent resounding—or, rather, quiet—successes.

More important yet, Hitrec has chosen his stories shrewdly and has hit upon the simple but brilliant idea of arranging them in chronological order of the time depicted in them. Thus we get another chronicle of Bosnia through the ages like the one in Andrić's most famous novel, The Bridge on the Drina, yet in many respects surpassing that book in excellence while, surprisingly, matching it in controlled diversity. Here is a cross-fertilizing correspondence joining across centuries a jaded Turkish pasha to an Austrian officer's womenfolk, a murderous Ottoman berserker to a lowly Christian monk, Eastern usurpers to Western visitors to native peasantry. All of them are physically assaulted by this fierce, barren, and somehow overhuman land in which wonderful trivialities and unspeakable horrors walk side by side, as do insight and inscrutability in Andric's darkly beautiful prose.