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.