I have picked this up in used bookstores over a period of years, thumbed through it, then put it down, quite sure I did not have the time to give it.
Recently, I found it again (maybe the same copy picked up over and over again, since it was in the same used bookstore in the French Quarter I have been roaming since I was a teenager) and bought it this time. Hey why not; it's freakin' hot here right now...
It sits next to 3 or 4 others currently open, and it also comes on travel with me.. As a half/Pole (2 generations removed- I think; that's how removed we are), the story of Yugoslavia is fascinating and sorrowful to me.
In the book, West travels to Yugoslavia for a second time in the late 1930s, this time with her husband. For any reader, how she explains practical, maddening basic life in its humor and beauty and sadness in the stories and history is for anyone and everyone.
West takes us on a sweeping panoramic view of the physical and cultural majesty of the Kingdom, and along the way offers herself as a friendly aisle companion. She introduces us openly to her friends and her thoughts and opinions. I am gratified that it was written by a female writer who I can now added to the list of those teachers of practical observation and tone- Didion, Blixsen, Solnit, Di Prima, more too, but that gives you an idea where I think she belongs.

I am not even halfway done with the book, and I expect it might take me calendar years to add it to the finished pull-down menu of above, but I do not mind. I appreciate the sprawl and detail of this magnificent work, and like a beautiful mountain that I decided to climb, there is no value in haste.

Yeah, that's right. It took me almost ten years to read this book.

Context: Read only at work over the ocasional lunch-break. The book itself alternated between utterly fascinating and dry as dust and finishing is a testament only to my love of the Balkans.

I shall now recycle this book so it shall never torment another soul. (It's pretty battered, broken into pieces to facilitate easy lunching, and was pre-owned and contained copious notes of the original owner.) Rest in pieces, noble travelogue.

I'm not rating this, because I don't know how to rate it. This was my pick for March of the Mammoths. I bought it years ago when I was preparing for a trip to Central Europe, including Slovenia and Croatia. Twice I started it, but never got past the first hundred pages. This time I was determined to read it. Why? Why do people run marathons or climb Mt. Everet? For bragging rights. For a sense of accomplishment. To pick a challenging task and see it through. It took me a month and a half of almost daily reading, about 30 pages a day, to get through it. For the most part I enjoyed it. I looked forward to reading it every day, almost like a meditation. I don't remember most of what I read it. But it's like when you're on a train watching the landscape go by. Most of the time your eyes glide over the scene. But sometimes your eyes catch on something and you focus on it until it passes out of sight.

Strangely enough, I liked the history sections the least. Probably because I have only the most basic knowledge of the region, so I had little reference for people and events she referred to. But I really enjoyed the travelogue portions, where she talked about their daily adventures, the people they met, land they traveled through, buildings or art they admired. I liked hearing about Constantine and his petty wife. And of course through it all you get glimpses of the Nazis and the looming war.

I can't say I'd recommend this book. But if you are the kind of person who is intrigued by the challenge of reading a 1000+ page book about Yugoslavia in the 1930s, then go for it! Probably my biggest takeaway after this adventure is that I now feel I can read literally any book I set my mind to. Now I'm off to finally finish Moby Dick, another large and rather perplexing but intriguing book.

Good gravy, this author can write! Some of the best prose I've seen in a book, ever, both for its beauty and its good sense. Just... just listen to this:

"Proust has pointed out that if one goes on performing any action, however banal, long enough, it automatically becomes ‘wonderful’: a simple walk down a hundred yards of village street is ‘wonderful’ if it is made every Sunday by an old lady of ninety. Franz Josef had for so long risen from his camp bed at four o’clock in the morning and worked twelve or fourteen hours on his official papers that he was recognized as one of the most ‘wonderful’ of sovereigns, almost as ‘wonderful’ as Queen Victoria, though he had shown no signs of losing in age the obstinacy and lack of imagination that made him see it as his duty to preserve his court as a morgue of etiquette and his Empire as a top-heavy anachronism. He was certain of universal acclamation not only during his life but after his death, for it is the habit of the people, whenever an old man mismanages his business so that it falls to pieces as soon as he dies, to say, ‘Ah, So-and-so was wonderful! He kept things together so long as he was alive, and look what happens now he has gone!’"

You could write an entire business book around this quote, and she just spins it off as though it were nothing, and keeps going, for twelve hundred more pages. Listen to this, too:

"The conspirators blew open the door of the palace with a dynamite cartridge which fused the electric lights, and they stumbled about blaspheming in the darkness, passing into a frenzy of cruelty that was half terror. The King and Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours, listening to the searchers grow cold, then warm, then cold again, then warm, and at last hot, and burning hot. The weakling King was hard to kill: when they threw him from the balcony they thought him doubly dead from bullet wounds and sword slashes, but the fingers of his right hand clasped the railing and had to be cut off before he fell to the ground, where the fingers of his left hand clutched the grass. Though it was June, rain fell on the naked bodies in the early morning as they lay among the flowers."

Rebecca West takes nothing for granted. Everything she ever reads about or sees during her years studying and visiting the Balkans, she stares at with such intensity that she enters into the person or place or thing and examines it from all angles, external and internal, before picking out the most interesting bits and flinging them at the page.

Now listen to this, about some Germans she met, who complained about Nazis raising their taxes:

"It was disconcerting to be rushing through the night with this carriageful of unhappy muddlers, who were so nice and so incomprehensible, and apparently doomed to disaster of a kind so special that it was impossible for anybody not of their blood to imagine how it could be averted. Their helplessness was the greater because they had plainly a special talent for obedience."

And this quote about Yugoslavia:

"A State which fights and believes it has a moral right to fight, and would give up either fighting or religion if it felt the two inconsistent."

Or this quote about a church service, which is objectively existentially terrifying but also just so, so pretty:

"From this divided congregation came a flood of song which asked for absolutely nothing, which did not ape childhood, which did not pretend that sour is sweet and pain wholesome, but which simply adored. If there be a God who is fount of all goodness, this is the tribute that should logically be paid to Him; if there be only Goodness, it is still a logical tribute. And again the worship, like their costume, was made astonishing by their circumstance. These people, who had neither wealth nor security, nor ever had had them, stood before the Creator and thought not what they might ask for but what they might give. To be among them was like seeing an orchard laden with apples or a field of ripe wheat endowed with a human will and using it in accordance with its own richness."

This is how the entire book sounds: A consummate observer and writer who has either stumbled upon some of the world's most interesting people at one of the most interesting times in history, or who is just so good that any people and time she chose would feel just as special. Good gravy.

Reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon over the course of the past 14 months now stands as one of the most profound interactions I've had with a book in my three decades of life as a bibliophile. So much so that I now feel at a loss for words to sum it up. "The greatest travel book ever written" seems a natural place to start, but "travel book" is an awfully humble label to stick on a 1150-page book that takes on history, war, politics, religion, philosophy, science, and the nature of man with such wisdom and emotion and cleverness ... and which does so in prose as clear and elegant -- and with a cast of characters as rich and complex! -- as you'll find in any Victorian novel. Written on the very edge of World War II, the dangers West describes are also frighteningly and depressingly familiar. So in addition to being insightful and beautiful and funny and compassionate, it's entirely relevant in 2019.

So, yes: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one of the best books I've ever read. Maybe it's The Best. It is surely as true a literary masterpiece as has ever been produced. My mind is full to overflowing with thoughts and ideas now that I've finished, and I'll be sorting those out long after I place it back on the shelf. Once it's there, I know I'll soon be pulling it back down, flipping through it, locating passages, consulting my margin notes, snapping pictures of paragraphs with my phone and texting them to friends. It's that kind of book. It'll be with me forever.