Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

by Rebecca West (Author) "We spent the night at Salzburg, and in the morning we had time to visit the house where Mozart was born, and look at his..." (more)
Key Phrases: Franz Ferdinand, Stephen Dushan, King Alexander (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Part travelogue, part history, part love letter on a thousand-page scale, Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a genre-bending masterwork written in elegant prose. But what makes it so unlikely to be confused with any other book of history, politics, or culture--with, in fact, any other book--is its unashamed depth of feeling: think The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire crossed with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. West visited Yugoslavia for the first time in 1936. What she saw there affected her so much that she had to return--partly, she writes, because it most resembled "the country I have always seen between sleeping and waking," and partly because "it was like picking up a strand of wool that would lead me out of a labyrinth in which, to my surprise, I had found myself immured." Black Lamb is the chronicle of her travels, but above all it is West following that strand of wool: through countless historical digressions; through winding narratives of battles, slavery, and assassinations; through Shakespeare and Augustine and into the very heart of human frailty.

West wrote on the brink of World War II, when she was "already convinced of the inevitability of the second Anglo-German war." The resulting book is colored by that impending conflict, and by West's search for universals amid the complex particulars of Balkan history. In the end, she saw the region's doom--and our own--in a double infatuation with sacrifice, the "black lamb and grey falcon" of her title. It's the story of Abraham and Isaac without the last-minute reprieve: those who hate are all too ready to martyr the innocent in order to procure their own advantage, and the innocent themselves are all too eager to be martyred. To West, in 1941, "the whole world is a vast Kossovo, an abominable blood-logged plain." Unfortunately, little has happened since then to prove her wrong. --Mary Park

Review
A masterpiece . . . as astonishing in its range, in the subtlety and power of its judgment, as it is brilliant in expression. -- The Times, London

Rebecca West’s magnum opus . . . one of the great books of our time. -- Clifton Fadiman, The New Yorker

Surely one of the great books of our century. -- Diana Trilling --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1200 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (April 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140188479
• ISBN-13: 978-0140188479
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #253,294 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, October 26, 2001

By	Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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!!

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Been there, done that, then read BLGF, September 15, 2005

By	Mark L. La Rue "Marc L LeRoux" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Dense But Rewarding Masterpiece, September 7, 2004

By	Stephen B. Selbst (Old Greenwich, CT USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.