The legendary critic Diana Trilling, who in this edition's blurb calls it one of the best of the 20th century, gets it right. The nay-sayers here who pan it, don't.
Its reputation suffers currently because Rebecca West, writing in the late 1930s, sympathized with the Serbs, whose reputation has been darkened in our time by the atrocities of Bosnia and Kosovo.
I would guess most West opponents favor rival Croats or Albanians just as they claim she favors the Serbs. A Serb advocate might point out that Croats and Muslims committed a few atrocities of their own as Yugoslavia broke apart. And a West defender may note that she was not equipped with a crystal ball showing Slobodan Milosevic's rise a half century later.
When she wrote, the Serbs readily evoked Western sympathy: They were on the Allied side in World War I, and would be again, before the book went to press, in World War II, when they were invaded for bravely defying Hitler. They were Christians, inheritors of the legacy of Byzantium, who freed themselves from five centuries of Turkish Islamic domination, and had fought as well to free Macedonia and Bosnia. Their king had just been assassinated in France in an act machinated by Mussolini and abetted, through silence, by the world's nations. They suffered greatly throughout their history, including World War I, when the war with more powerful Austria swept back and forth over the land twice, forcing the army and many civilians to flee at one point in a horrifying death march through winter and mountains. And the Serbs had always fought with little more than moral support from great power allies, who betrayed them again and again. Weighing against them was their Orthodox Christian rite which often put them at odds with the powerful Roman Catholic Church.
This book, however much it might have seemed dated during the 1990s, takes on a greater significance in the post 9/11 world: She shows us just how deep the roots of the Christian-Islamic conflict run in this land, for centuries that conflict's front line.
West, for example, distinguishes marvelously between the Bosnian Muslims - Slavs who converted to Islam during the Turkish occupation, many of them Slav nationalists who supported Yugoslav nationhood - and the Turks themselves, who regarded the Slavs as other and inferior. She finds fascinating cross-religious alliances, with the Austrian Catholics cozying up to the Muslims of Bosnia when Austria ruled it, to the detriment of the land's Croat Catholics and Orthodox Serbs, who expected better of fellow Christians. She details a positively surreal scene in Sarajevo, where the Muslims anxiously await the first Turkish republican emissaries since the Ottomans were driven out a half century earlier. When these modern, Westernized diplomats arrive, from their land where Ataturk banned the fez and the burka, they are warm to modern Yugoslav officials, but baffled by and cool to what they regard as the still-backwards, Orientalized Muslims of Bosnia.
West got away with a writing style full of ethnic generalizations that, today, would likely be attacked, by airheads anyway, as politically incorrect, regardless of the many hard truths she wrote. A feminist, she wrote of gender in a way delightfully free of today's academic cant. You'll find nary a "patriarchy" or "hegemony" here; she talks of men and women only when it matters.
I don't believe she leans too strongly towards the Serbs. It is, after all, in great part the story of their lands, and of the short-lived state led by their monarchy. Her section on Bosnia, where the Croats, Serbs and Muslims all mixed, is fair to all sides. She finds much with which to fascinate the reader in Dubrovnik and elsewhere along the Dalmatian coast. The primary villains here are the Turks - not today's modernized, democratic Turks, but their imperial Ottoman predecessors, who sucked wealth and civilization out of the Balkans to set the stage for today's animosities. And West even manages to find some redemption for them in their transcending love of nature and the well-designed, pleasant homes they left behind.
You are unlikely to find in English a more cogent account of the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, which led to World War I. One sees how this equalled the Kennedy assassination for its lingering scent of conspiracy - was the killing actually orchestrated by the Russians? by the Austrians themselves? - and surpassed it in shaking the world, despite targeting a much less popular or powerful man.
Many histories can supply hard facts. BLGF stands out for West's elegant travelogue writing in which she lashes together history; national and individual character; geography, ethnicity, and politics. She and her husband journey through Yugoslavia accompanied by a guide and translator who, also a poet, helps interpret the places that signify in Yugoslav history, as well as mundane settings from which West gleans the essence of the nation's many peoples.
The book's length daunts, and sometimes the writing drags. Tensions with the guide-poet's German wife during the group's trip through Macedonia take up too much space. But one can forgive even this: West finds, in this woman's hostility and condescension toward her husband's country, the attitudes that were then driving Germany toward conquest - including its brutal occupation of Yugoslavia beginning in 1941, the year this book was published.
Readers might consider countering the book's length by taking each national section - on Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and so forth - as individual books, setting the tome down for a while before starting the next unit.
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No need for the profuse litter of phonetic symbols
My 5 stars are for the 2 Vol 1st ed. (@1200 pp) which I had borrowed from our library system previously.Yesterday I purchased the Kindle ed of what pictures on Amazon as the same as the Penguin paperback ed with Intro by Hitchens.The Intro is NOT by Hitchens—but Geoff Dyer 2006—and the body of text has been littered with phonetic symbols , supposedly for pronunciation for English speakers ( due to the Cyrillic alphabet), BUT even in the intro where they are entirely unnecessary because no places are mentioned.An unnecessary addition—certainly not present in the 1st edition—and a bit off putting. Cannot even imagine this trash showing up in the paper Penguin edition
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 6, 2023