Death and the Dervish (Writings from an Unbound Europe)

Death and the Dervish is an acclaimed novelby Bosnian writer Mesa Selimovic. It recounts the story of Sheikh Nuruddin,a dervishresiding inanIslamicmonastery in Sarajevo in the eighteenth century during theOttoman Turkhegemony over the Balkans. When his brother is arrested, he must descend into the Kafkaesque world of the Turkish authorities in his search to discover what happened to him. Henarrates his story in the form of an elaborate suicide note, regularly misquoting the Koran. In time, he begins to question his relations with society as a whole and, eventually, his life choices in general. Hugely successful when published in the 1960s,Death and the Dervishis an enduringclassic from twentieth-century Yugoslavia.