Customer Reviews

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Penguin Classics)

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Love it or hate it, anyone with an interest in the Balkans will eventually have to deal with this book. Rebecca West is one of the giants of 20th century literature. Never heard of her? I hadn't either until I read this sprawling opus. Don't be put off by the size of the book, however (West herself writes that most people probably won't read this book because of the massive length). Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a travelogue detailing West's travels through 1930's Yugoslavia. The book goes far beyond travelogue as West intersperses massive doses of Slavic history and philosophy with her travel accounts. Not only do we see the things she sees, we understand the mentality of the people. These people she meets and places she visits become almost mystical under her magical pen. I read this book over a six week period at the end of the summer. Like West on her travels, I meandered through the book, reading it religiously at times and then setting it down for a bit to read other things. This might be the best way to read the book. It allows the reader to absorb what West is trying to say without being overwhelmed by the immense amounts of information.

I have to say that I was most fascinated by her discourses on Yugoslav history. Balkan history can be a challenge because most of us in the West really don't understand the people or places involved. A section on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand runs on forever and never becomes boring. In fact, I became so enraptured of this event that I started reading other works concerning the assassination. Even though there are some problems with West's interpretation of history, her accounts are so well written that it makes the reader want to go out and read more about these events.

Many have criticized Rebecca West for her bias and her tendency to simplify history. This is a valid concern. Her most serious transgression is her rabid hatred of anything German. It literally infects parts of the book with a somber, unpleasant tone. Right from the beginning of the book we see West criticizing a group of German tourists who are on a train with her as she travels into the Balkans. The bias finds greatest expression when West writes about her relationship with her Yugoslav guide Constantine and his wife Gerda. Constantine is a Jew and a Slav, but Gerda is a German whom West seems to believe is a Nazi. West's slanders on Gerda are endless, so much so that Constantine himself eventually turns against West. What is important to remember is that West is English and World War II was only a few years away. West actually wrote this book a few years after her trip, in 1941, so war was already raging between the two countries. If I were a German, I would be offended by West's comments.

Please read this book. I guarantee you'll enjoy it, at least to some extent. Even if you don't like history, the descriptions of the Yugoslav people and places are enchanting. I wanted to hop on a plane and go to Yugoslavia after reading this book, although it's important to remember that this account was written during World War II and before the Communist occupation that followed the war. I imagine things have changed quite a bit in this part of the world since the 1930's. What prose! What endless beauty! Images that flow like honey! Read this and dream!!

I read BLGF after returning to the US after living in the region for over two years. I found and read Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts," while the 1999 NATO action in Kosovo within clear sight of the situation. Kaplan made numerous positive referrences to BLGF so I found and read that soon after returning to the US. (I do know that Clinton did read BG (and that this led him to intervene in Bosnia-Herzegovina) and so may have read BLGF after leaving office). I suppose it was because of my very personal witness to the Balkans when I was living there, in particular the personal stories and lives that were generously offered by loving and almost pathetically nationalistic people. I found that RW, regardless of her "only six week" tour of Yugoslavia hit the button on the head in an overwhelming fashion. The personal emotional bias must be understood and the historical meat filtered through it. I didn't find that any history she related was false. What did startle me was how much similar her findings were to my own, fifty years later. When one understands that Tito effectively froze the populations of Yugoslavia in time through the use of forced migrations and a strong secret police force, how this could be becomes easy to grasp. But Rebecca West's journalistic intellect reaches its zenith when after witnessing the ritual slaughter of lambs, makes one of the best arguments against religion I have ever read. At once, she makes the best intellectual and emotional argument I can never have imagined as I read the brilliance of it. How a people come to act as both lambs and falcons, victims of history, myth and legend. The story of the Serbian people and for that matter the Balkans is something not to be missed by anyone interested in the story of civilization.

I lived in Slovenia in the late 1990s for over two years, serving the public in concert with a Slovenian orthopedic surgeon. I was married there in 1999 before returning to the US. As one deeply drawn to historic studies since childhood, I carried along with me, a small library of historic works on European history, including the very large History of the Habsburg Empire, published by the Berkeley University Press. I traveled to many regions, but more importanly, had (and still retain) friends who are Slovene, Serb, Bosnian Serb as well as acquaintances of some in higher government and military offices. At one point, I was even invited to an informal meeting of (Ljublijana) university professors and a Croatian UN Bosnia-Herzegovina Peacekeeper mission executive. I was present to witness the development of the problems in Kosovo and led to the Bombing Campaign in 1999. I saw the protests against it that took place in front of the US Embassy in Ljublijana as I went there for the settling of various matters so I could be married in Slovenia legally. My dear, loving Serbian receptionist was symbolically blocking the entrance with other protestors. And later that day we met at the office and worked with only the slightest bit of simmering resentment, so deep was our care for one another. Through her, I learned so much, and on a later return, attended a Serbian Orthodox service as her guest, just to get a deeper feeling of the history of these people. It was very moving. People torn between the most generous loving inclinations with a rare love of life and at the same time, mutilated by a long history of oppression. They see themselves alone with the world against them. This same friend was also in the crowd in Belgrade that finally brought down Milosevic. All attempts to understand and find the tortured human element in Serbs is an obligation for us. And doing so does not require that we denigrate or minimalize the Albanians or any other of the ethnic groups in the Balkans. BLGF so enriched by complement, all these experiences. When I return, I do so with a greater and greater depth of knowledge and tolerance for all, regardless of the minefields of strong nationalistic sentiments one must step through to do so.


What makes BLGF so great and a must read for anyone remotely interested in history or literature in general is that it is at once an excellent source of introductory history of a region that has been for the West, lost in a mist of vagarities and myth. At the same time related as a personal experience by RW in a almost lyric fashion. Go with it, even the angry diatribes about men. History becomes real when it is felt as a personal experience; That is why traveling and living abroad is so valuable for everyone, but especially for Americans, who need to understand the world that their government so often effects. If there is anyplace in the world that can teach us that nothing is simple and perhaps most important, impress the American reader with the eternal sense of history, expanding that compression of time that US history lives in, the Balkans are it. This is a book that ought to be used at least at the community college class level in both literature and history classes.

I have read many of the reviews and various opinions on this book, including the one critic living in the region who only allowed one star. (Locals hate outsiders having any opinion of them). My view is that all the praises and criticisms are valid and deserved, even the one that questions whether RW and her husband had any kind of sexual realtionship and if her husband might have actually been homosexual. Without doubt, RW was a strong willed individual and I gathered from her occassional diatribes concerning men that she had a issue with the entire gender and completely capable of a "marriage of convenience." (So what)? Realizing that her father had left her mother and then soon died, must be somewhat to blame. Allow her to be human, it made her what she was as a writer. So although I found her rants less than usefull, I allowed her to be human because this book is part journal, part essay and part diary. How many authors have laid their own feelings out so clearly. Given the period that it was published in, that took courage. I have to wonder with our emotionally suppressive PC enviroment today, how could anyone even conceive such writing today and not be shouted down by the "thought police" installed in their own mind? Welcome to journalism before PC! What a gift that is in itself - an artifact of true intellectual freedom.

In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West weaves together history, ethnography and travelogue into an encyclopedic and unforgettable portrait of this troubled region. As I explain below, I think there are some marvelous things about this book, and some aspects that are less well realized. On balance, it is well worth the effort, but for somebody considering it, the cautions are worth noting. First the highlights:

West is at her best as a reporter. She has a truly brilliant eye for detail, for simply seeing how the people lived, what they wore, how they worshipped and what they did with their days. Her images, particularly of the remote communities and the many churches and religious shrines that she visited, are particularly well rendered. Although the book lacks photographs or drawings, West's very considerable talents for description are such that the reader really gets a feel for a large number of diverse places within the Balkans.

She also does an excellent job illuminating a great deal of the history of the region, both relatively modern history (meaning modern at the time the book was written -- 1941) and more ancient history. Modern history at the time West wrote meant dealing with the Balkan wars, the series of rebellions by which the vestiges of the Ottoman empire were overthrown in the 19th and early 20th centuries. West devotes particular attention to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, which precipitated World War I, an event that at the time of the writing of the book was still relatively recent in the world's memory, and the facts of which were still somewhat controversial. Ancient history meant dealing with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the decisive battle in which the Turks defeated the Orthodox Serbs led by Tsar Lazar and began to move further north and east in Europe.

West's writing on why liberal democracies are typically reluctant to arm themselves to confront militant totalitarian regimes, which forms a secondary theme, seems quite fresh. West writes as an unabashed liberal and closely analyzes both her own squeamishness about violence and why, in more general terms, liberals' reluctance to use force is ultimately suicidal. Her criticism of the pacifism of the governments of pre-World War II England and France in the face of the visible threat of a rearming Germany and a bellicose Italy is both fascinating and dead-on. One of the points she makes in her admiration of the Slavs is that for five centuries, beginning with the Battle of of Kosovo, and largely ignored by Western Europe, they took arms against the totalitarian regime of their day, militant Islam in the form of the Ottoman empire. Her point of view on this issue is quite clear: for taking on this task, she regards the Serbs to have been the unrecognized and unthanked saviors of Western Christianity.

As brilliant as this book is, however, it will not be to every reader's taste, even those who want to explore the history of the Balkans in depth. West makes little effort to disguise her prejudices: she sees the Slavs as an heroic if primitive race who had been ill-used by the then Great Powers of Europe, Great Britian, France, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And within what was then the newly-formed state of Yugoslavia (which came into being after World War I), she is emphatic in her sympathies for the Serbs, whom she sees as the the descendants of what was good and right in the Byzantine empire. West is equally obvious in her lack of sympathy for the Croats and the Bosnians. But seen through the lens of the more recent wars of Serbian aggression, it is harder to see the Serbs in such an unqualifiedly heroic light.

Other parts of the books also wear less well, including her prolixity (the paperback edition is a whopping 1150 pages of small print). West's long tirades on the evils of the Austro-Hungarian empire seem a curiosity at this point; as evil as it may have been, it has long been relegated to the dustbin of history. Her antipathy to the Germans also seems an historical set piece, although rather more understandable in its context. And West's economic analyses of modern capitalism appear naive and superficial. Finally, the relatively major roles played in her narrative by she and her husband, their Serbian guide Constantine, and his German wife Gerda, are, at best, distracting. But these reservations should be seen for what they are: minor criticisms of an awe-inspiring work.

...I initially was not so moved to write this review of Ms. West's remarkable work. What has inspired in me the need, though, was the reading of her being persistently condemned for her sympathy for the poor beleagured Serbians. Indeed...moreso than anything else, her work has forced me to ponder the question of 'What shall we tomorrow say of the 'poor, exploited, tormented Kosovars'?' It is most ironic that Ms. West's six-week journey through Yugoslavia should have so accurately succeeded in capturing the spirit of the land. Read it not for a travel guide, but as a snapshot of the past...nowhere else do we have access to many of the prodigious quantity of sources which she employed in her authoring...and whereelse may we hope to find a British tourist's view of the Balkans upon the eve of war? Nowhere. It is unique...and incomparable...and her revelations are sometimes stunning, her prose frequently beauteous...thus, five stars.

One has to stand in awe before this enormous (ll40 pages) masterpiece of literary travel writing, even with its prejudice and poetry and occasional unkindness. Ms West and her husband and Constantine (he of the stubby fingers and wicked keyboard technique who tells unbelievable stories and opines on every imaginable topic) travel through Yugoslavia at the time Hitler is gaining power in Germany and the Habsburg Empire is just a dirty memory. Constantine is a Serb utterly devoted to the continued existence of the Yugoslav state but he's married to a dreadful hausfrau who despises anything that is not German and especially Slavs. She thus makes her own life miserable and does a number on the lives of everyone else. The book offers rich descriptions of all the states that make up (or made up)Yugoslavia, including religious and social customs, the mental and emotional tendencies of the people (sometimes depending on which outside influences -- Turkish, Austrian -- have impacted them most decisively). Montenegran men come in for high praise because because of their physical beauty and the presumed ease with which they could inseminate any woman. The book is a masterwork of richly textured Enlgish prose done in long, elegant, sometimes convoluted sentence that are a delight to read and may remind some readers of Proust. St. Paul and St. Augustine come in for the mistreatment they so richly deserve (the author traces several questionable religious practices she encounters to ideas found in their writings). This is a work for reasonably well educated adults, so anyone approaching it in search of accurate factual history is making a mistake. But nor will it mislead anyone on matters of historical fact.

"One must give these sheep-stealers plainly to understand that the European governments have no need to harness themselves to their lusts and rivalries." So Otto von Bismark, the German Chancellor and all-round diplomatic high-wire artist. The sheep-stealers in question are the nations of the Balkans, whose politics, evidently, were enough to frustrate even this most adroit of intriguers. Perhaps happily for him, he did not live long enough to see the world do exactly what he feared.

There are two ways to get a grip on those Balkans -- a short way and a long way. The short way is through "The Bridge on the Drina," by the Slavic Nobelist, Ivo Andric. The other is the great, sprawling monstrosity (cited above) by Rebecca West. Andric's novelized account of a near-millennium of Ottoman rule is a marvel of (if nothing else) concision. Individual set-pieces are unforgettable: the account of an impalement is not for the faint of heart.

But anything as compact as Andric's narrative must necessarily expose itself to a charge of oversimplification, That is one charge few could bring against West's 1100-odd pages (not including index and bibliographical note). This is an irony, because West on the surface appears to have an agenda so simplistic as to be crude: the Yugoslavs are a species of noble savage, while their North European "betters" - more precisely, the Germans, are a gang of buffoons. Her caustic sendup of life in a train compartment with a party of German tourists is hilarious in its own right, and it surely didn't hurt her as the book hit the market at the beginning of World War II (also: it is near the beginning, so anyone who wants to claim to have read the whole will want to get at least that far).

But facts do her the kindness of getting in the way. Agenda or no, West is one of the world's great reporters, with an enviable capacity to see not just what she wants to see, but rather what is before her eyes. The result is the best kind of journalism, and the best kind of history: a book full of exceptions "We are too rough and too deep for your smoothness and your shallowness," her guide tells her in a fit of impatience. "That is why most foreign books about us are insolently wrong." West must be wrong about a lot of things: any book so rich in detail and texture would have to be wrong about something. Thanks to her good efforts, it will be harder for her readers to be wrong.

I read _Black Lamb and Grey Falcon_ about three years ago, just as the Kosovo conflict was at its height, and the book seemed to me then almost an essential primer to Yugoslav history and politics as seen from Anglo-American eyes. West has a strong tendency to simplify history and to write through the lens of prejudices against Germans and Muslims, so don't take her historical accuracy for granted. But she is a sympathetic traveller, a person who is fascinated by foreign places and who understands that cultural context is everything, and simply for this the book is worthwhile.

However, I find the book especially valuable as an example of the "encyclopedic" book: the kind of book that transcends genres (history? travel literature? personal essays? memoir?), that is eager to accumulate and to share knowledge, that a reader ends up wanting to live with. Even though the important conflicts of the day have shifted east from Kosovo (but her discussion of the migration of the Turks into the Balkans is essential material for understanding the place of Muslims in Europe today), her book stays with me: not for what it says about Yugoslavia, but for what it says about how literature can be the tissue that connects individuals and history. Although reading this book is by no means a minor undertaking, it's well worth the time and trouble.

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.

A somewhat queer book, but widely regarded as a classic. West is a splendid prose stylist, but not entirely trustworthy as a historian. She flits continually back and forth across the line between fact and fiction, and draws more symbolic meaning and universal truth from any given scene than any mere mortal rightfully ever should. West can be criticized for being almost obsequiously pro-Serbian, narrowly anti-Croat and even bigoted in her aversion to Germans, but her attitudes are easier to understand if one considers the time during which she did her research and writing. The book became controversial in some intellectual circles during the 1990s, as some believe Western policymakers were under the influence of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon when they were late and weak about intervening in the wars of Yugoslav succession. That strikes me as a silly notion. In that West has written 1,150 pages and continually diverges from the main thread of her narrative, I frankly doubt that more than a handful of policymakers-in all countries of the globe combined-ever have read her book from cover to cover. She herself confesses (p. 773) that "hardly anybody will read" her book "by reason of its length." Like War and Peace, Moby Dick and the Holy Bible, this is a literary classic that one should read because it is good for you.

Yes "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is wonderful for all the reasons stated in these reviews, but for all that it must be said that the dominant theme of Ms West's masterpiece is the eternal human condition. She sees with the eyes of a woman and the eyes of a genius. She has seen humanity's troubled soul, and gently brought it to the surface in the fabric of her marvelous linguistic tapestry. "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is in a class by its self.