2.5/5

You can blame Goodreads for this rating being rounded down rather than up. Anything three-starred or higher gets churned up in a 'liked it' mash and spewed forth on recommendations that have nothing to do with why I read the book in the first place and everything to do with sucking up to the capitalism machine. If I could get some assurance of my rating having the nuance of 'found it useful despite all odious efforts to the contrary', I'd bother with the effort of joining in with the percentage points that are on the side of yay rather than nay and play its own small role in the advertising juggernaut. As it stands, this book is already suffering from a preponderance of overblown praise intent on selling it to all and sundry without the slightest consideration for how all and sundry may differ from this book's optimal reader, who will be white, well off, and think that Trump really gets the United States. Anyone offended by that last one should take a good look at West and her utter refusal to see where her ideologies and those of her nightmarish Nazis and Facists are in such delightful agreement.

I did not greatly care what he thought of me, for I was too greatly interested in him, and any personal relations between us could not aid my interest, for I could get everything out of him that I could ever get by watching him.

That, and some history that was the only redeeming factor for this read by way of utmost usefulness, is the entirety of the book. West goes, West sees, West writes some fanfiction that coagulates around fingers in too many pies and results in some virulently racist and Islamophobic tract whose worth lies only in the few facts that manage to slip past her sentimental grasp. If you took Tolstoy's epilogue to War and Peace and expanded it to 1150 of the 1400+ pages, you'd get a sense of flavor of disgruntled whining filling hundreds upon hundreds of pages; one obsessed with the threat of a literate proletariat, the other convinced that queer people are the reason for everything going wrong in the world. The commentaries on imperialism, nationalism, capitalism, and oppression are aborted by West's tendency to treat with everything as types, rather than facts: "Americans" are wishy washy white liberals with paranoid tendencies, the British Empire has mostly redeeming qualities while the Ottoman Empire was nothing but stagnant filth, and it's the industrial workers that are to blame for Hitler and Mussolini, not the veins of hatred that have been carefully cultivated for centuries by both the European powers and every nation they have spawned. Only a few of the broad sides caused by her continued and defensive thrusting her head in the sand, mind you. She makes apologisms for everything from anti-Semitism to pedophilia, and whatever prose style she has works more to obfuscate her have-her-cake-and-eat-it-too attitude towards the oh so poor but manly Slavs, the sadly neglected but obviously blood inherited aesthetics of the Byzantine Empire, and the Catholic/Orthodox tradition. The fact that I better understand the aspects of religious piety the title of this work refers than she does is sad, to say the least. All that reading, and she couldn't even spare a glance for the hagiographies of female saints? The closest she got was Saint Monica, who wasn't even referred to by name and was probably only appreciated with how she kept her husband a 'true' man and insured her son is remembered to this day.

The worst part about this books is I have no idea where to go from here. I can't trust the bibliography, as West's characterizing of epistemological worth relies on little more than on how well she can mold whatever she comes across into some drama of stereotypes and on her pride. Recommendations would be great if I hadn't been led to this work by recommendations in the first place and the compatriot lists below my shelving of this wasn't littered with stars galore and very little serious consideration of values other than how many subjects someone tries to talk about, how well someone writes, and how long their money and self-satisfaction allows them to write. My best bet is to move along the lines of what West admitted to, such as the history of Islam and Turkey (the two are not identical) in southeastern Europe, the Romani (you don't get to say g*psy unless you are Romani. It's a slur, and the hatred is alive and well as evidenced in the white washing that happened in Avengers 2 and films subsequent to that), and history actually written by those with some investiture in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia, beyond some trite approval of tourist souvenirs and a desire to do some novel "noble savage" writing that hadn't already been taken up by Bird and Blixen.

By the end of this book, Constantine, West's officiating friend and knowledgeable tour guide, has had a physically noticeable breakdown that results in, among other things, an increased antagonism towards his English wanderlusters. West chalks it up to his wife's antisemitism (a wife that West blames for everything from Nazis to the denial of world peace) and remains content in the belief that they would be in Constantine's good graces if he was in his right mind. If West had been reading even a fraction of the trash she had written aloud to her Serbian thinker, the only surprise is that his patience didn't run out sooner.

Why should Western cretins drool their spittle on our sacred things?

There's nothing like finishing off some monstrous entity to the point that naysayers cannot use lack of completion as leverage for enforcing their own opinionated acceptance onto oneself.

There isn't really a good place to start in reviewing this. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is sprawling. While this novel is best defined as a travel memoir, it is mostly made up of a retelling of the story of the Balkans. As West traverses 1930's Yugoslavia, she gives a historical recounting of each destination she visits, thus placing her experiences in the context of the region's troubled past.

Occurring in 1937, there is a very unsettling feeling while reading through West's trip knowing the fate that Yugoslavia would suffer in the coming years. Every person met on the journey would soon be gravely impacted by the coming war. Many would be killed. It is a liminal feeling, being sandwiched in a brief moment of respite between hundreds of years of strife and the catastrophes to come.

West's main argument of the novel is that the pacifist desires to be martyred. The Grey Falcon represents the pacifism of the Balkan states in the face of Turkish invasion. The black lamb is the pointless sacrifice made in hopes of salvation. West's Yugoslavia is able to find redemption in the epilogue by resisting fascism despite inevitable destruction.

There is so much more to be said about this book that I am not ready to say. Really really great.

Took me 8 months to finish, and it was so worth the investment. West has crafted the travel memoir to end all travel memoirs that is just as relevant today as it was 80 years ago.

He vivido una de las experiencias más bonitas de mi vida al leer este libro justo después de haber venido de casi el mismo viaje que hizo la autora en 1936.

He leído la edición nueva de Reino de Redonda.

It’s truly a tome but amazing if you can get thru the long historical details. Will definitely read more Rebecca West

Wow, this was a brute of a read. West is occasionally outrageous, occasionally perceptive, occasionally funny, and always longwinded.

Rebecca West's magnum opus is very long. It's also fascinating, overwritten, opinionated, dramatic, tragic and satisfying. Some descriptive passages had me marvelling, others choking on the prose. The travelogue reads as a political dissertation on the struggling efforts of the various parts of a newly formed country to work and stay together. The characters who populate the daily travels and travails are drawn larger than life, though they presumably did exist and are based on real people. They are more likely archetypes of their various nationalities, accepting and denying by the same rules as their respective regions. As a history, this work is enormous not just in form, but in all of its years of anguished life and bloody death. The story of each region, from Croatia to Macedonia, is laid bare as the fields of Kossovo. Stark beauty strikes against against unbelievable tragedy. And instead of using the long tale of this country's combined history as a moral tale for a better future, the narrative finishes just as the Second World War has begun to tear the whole concept of a viable contract between uneasy neighbors into shredded bloody pieces.

I'm not sure I'll ever finish this, so I'm doing half a review here, since I've read a bit more than half of it. It's always been proclaimed as a great travel literature classic ... but now I can't help wondering how many of the proclaimers have actually made it to the end. I'm reading it on the Kindle and I did notice that the popular highlights petered out after about page 200 :)

Not that it's a bad book. Rebecca West is awe-inspiringly erudite and she's a good writer. The part where she visits Sarajevo and talks to people who were there when Franz Ferdinand was shot is fascinating. It's what history books should be like, cleverly illuminating the interaction of personalities with geopolitical issues. She concludes:

Nobody worked to ensure the murder on either side so hard as the people who were murdered. And they, though murdered, are not as pitiable as victims should be. They manifested a mixture of obstinate invocation of disaster and anguished complaint against it which is often associated with unsuccessful crime, with the petty thief in the dock.

But sometimes she's a bit too erudite for me, and it gets exhausting. She knows everything about the history of the Balkans since the year dot, and often expounds on it at great length. It's very easy to get confused with all the kings, queens, and assassins milling about. She's also a bit too interested in architecture. As a glimpse of her erudition, this is allegedly the conversation she has with her husband, before they have even had breakfast:

“But wait a minute, wait a minute,” said my husband. “I have just thought of something very curious. It has just occurred to me, does not Seton-Watson say in his book Sarajevo that Chabrinovitch was the son of a Bosnian Serb who was a spy in the service of the Austro-Hungarian Government?” “Why, so he did!” I exclaimed. “And now I come to think of it, Stephen Graham says so, too, in St. Vims’ Day.“ “This is most extraordinary,” said my husband, “for Seton-Watson is never wrong, he is in himself a standard for Greenwich time.” “And Stephen Graham may slip now and then, but in all essential matters he is in his own vague way precise,” I said.

Many of her attitudes will seem odd to modern ears too; nations and their citizens are ascribed distinct characters which persist through centuries. And then there are things like this that cause a sharp intake of breath:

There is nothing unpleasant in the gesture known as “cherry-picking,” provided it is a Negro or Negress who performs it; the dancer stands with feet apart and knees bent, and stretches the arms upwards while the fingers pull an invisible abundance out of the high air. But it is gross and revolting, a reversion to animalism, when it is performed by a white person.

Modern readers may also be a little surprised by her ardent admiration of Serbia, saviour of Europe from the threat of Islamic Turkey. She also has some prejudice against Germans, but in 1937 that is hardly surprising.

Anyway, I forgive her for her faults because she can write lines like: "the stumbling weighty hostility of bears, the incorporated rapacity of wolves". Or:

The puce-faced old soldier who held the line in front of us shook and heaved, producing laughter from some place one would never keep it unless one was in the habit of packing things away as safely as possible.

I may finish it one day!

The strengths of this book lie in its weaknesses; those being first and foremost that it’s gruelingly overwritten, waxes and wanes between history and travelogue with limited use of segue, and at times West demonstrates an almost schoolgirl infatuation with the Slavic people (I can forgive her distaste for Austrians and Germans this being written at the outbreak of WWII, however it is obvious she is not producing a balanced account of history). She also tends to trip over her own intellect (Christopher Hitchens' introduction breaks these issues down quite eloquently).

Her characters - the portrayals of those whom she met during her travels - also lack any distinction from the author in that much of their dialogue is written in her voice. They come across not so much as actual people but vehicles through which she expresses her own opinions. As an historian, West writes in a tangential style with no narrative cohesion, however she is for the most part accurate and her subjects interesting.

Especially good are the 100 or so pages on Franz Ferdinand (300 pages in). She paints a rich portrait of the man often overlooked in histories of the outbreak of WWI (Tuchman for example does not dig into the weeds where the Archduke is concerned because doing so wouldn't have been germane to her work).

It isn't possible to ingest everything presented, but what one does get out of taking this journey is a sense of who the Balkan peoples are, and more importantly why the region was the powder keg it was. It's ethnic complexion and complexities are laid bare in a scope that is no less than staggering, and prose which is often stunning. So whereas it is a difficult read due to its faults, it is also important, rewarding, and at times even uproariously funny.

Additionally, it remains relevant - frighteningly so - 80 years after it was written. West, an ardent Socialist, was indicting Capitalism (page 932) well before it reached the late stage we are currently living through. And the current war being waged by Russia against Ukraine can easily be viewed through the lens of West's themes. When its history is written, Ukraine will not be a black lamb.

This is history, philosophy, and memoir written with the literary might of Tolstoy and Proust. A challenge yes, but one well worth facing.