Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Penguin Classics)

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.

At 1,200 pages, you could probably kill someone by hitting them over the head with a copy of BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON. It would be more appropriate, in most cases, to instead recommend that they read this wonderful and amazing tale of a pre-World War II trip by Rebecca West and her husband through Yugoslavia.Yes, Yugoslavia doesn't really exist any more and it says much about the character and personality that allowed Josip Broz Tito to weave a diverse handful of Balkan countries into the Yugoslavia that existed for a half-century starting during that war. It seems the Serbs, the Croats, the Dalmatians, the Macedonians and all the other residents of the future Yugoslavia had wonderfully hateful reasons for turning their backs on one another over the centuries. West provides the historical and cultural backgrounds for the quirks and quarrels that kept these little nation states at war or, at least, at odds with their neighbors.The nation of Yugoslavia had not yet been put together by Tito when West and her husband journeyed through each of the small entities where centuries of hatred between its residents made the Balkans synonymous with political fracture. She notes the differences -- in habits, customs, economies, religions and ethnicities -- and provides incisive looks back into the histories of the places she spends time. This book has given me more insightful glances of the historical reasons the Balkans are Balkanized than anything I've ever come across.But it's more than history that drew me to West's tome: she has a dry wit that provides many an aside that helps us understand what she saw and what she thought of the new people with their new, to her, ways of cooking, of worshipping and of making a living. It makes foe wonderful reading, especially if you can space it out over a few months! This is a great book, a classic!

This is an amazing book written just at the start of the WW2. It's ostensibly a travel diary of a trip Rebecca West took through Yugoslavia but it's much more than that and covers Yugoslavia's tortured past, art religion and philosophy. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the modern Balkans,

遥か昔にペーパーバック版にレビューを寄せたのだが、デジタル版に連動しておらないようなので加筆修正の上で再投稿。現物だと1400頁弱の本書、持ち運びにはえらく重い上にペンギン版は字が小さい。デジタルブック時代が有り難くなる一冊だ。蛇足だが、最近になってボスニア・ムスリムが現在では「ボシュニャク人」と呼ばれるようになったらしいことを知って「へー」となっていた。ユーゴスラビア時代はそんな名称はなかったはずだが、ボスニアヘルチェゴビナ独立後に広まり出したらしい。という訳で、ユーゴスラビア紛争以来バルカン関連本が多数出版されたが、著者たちはおしなべて本書を読んでいたと記憶している。バルカンに興味を持つ人間にはバイブルのような一冊。著者のレベッカ・ウェスト（1892-1983）は英国の作家、文筆家。若い頃には左派の政治活動も行っている。本書はウェストによる大変に有名なユーゴスラヴィア旅行記で今では古典。「セルビア贔屓の本」としても有名だが、セルビア贔屓はワタシもそうだからそれは別にいい。執筆時点では「ユーゴスラビア（南スラブ人の国）」はまだ若い国だった。1934年マルセイユで起こったユーゴスラヴィア王アレクサンダー暗殺の回想から語り起こされ、執筆当時は第二次大戦前夜、ウェストが筆を置く頃、バルカンはすでにヒトラーとムッソリーニによって蹂躙されている。戦後、ティトーの下で再構成されたユーゴスラビアは現在はもう存在しない。「七つの国境、六つの共和国、五つの民族、四つの言語、三つの宗教、二つの文字、一つの国家」を連邦制で合体させる夢は、1991年から十年弱の間で瓦解した。ボスニア紛争終結まで持ち込んだ「デイトン合意」の立役者たちもほぼ亡くなった（ボスニア・セルビア人代表のカラジッチ氏だけは生存中）。リチャード・ホルブルック氏の訃報をニュースで知った時は一瞬驚いたものだったが、それも既に四年前か。エレガントな英語散文で綴られるユーゴスラビア各地の「物語」は古代から近現代まで、歴史と神話、政治史と外交史、芸術と産業、宗教と習俗…-考えられうる限りの多岐に渡っている。古代イリリアからアドリア海の海賊たち、ヴェネツィア共和国の策謀と商魂、イスラムの侵攻、ナポレオン軍の大望、ハンガリーの野望、ハプスブルク帝国の失政…南スラブ人の土地で繰り広げられた歴史絵巻と著者の深く広い考察が交差していく。ウェストの博識に圧倒されつつ、語り口の詩的軽妙さ、鋭敏な洞察力、人々を描く優しくユーモラスな筆使いに絶え間なく魅了される。本書は「ユーゴスラビア」というかつて歴上存在した夢に捧げられた本と言ってもいい。しかし語られるのは人類全てに共通する光と闇だ。故に本書は今後も古びない。ウェストは「人間なるもの」を探してユーゴスラビアに行ったのである。

ボスニア戦争以来バルカン関連本が多数出版されたが、著者たちはおしなべて本書を読んでいた。バルカンに興味を持つ人間にはバイブルのような一冊かもしれない。レベッカ・ウェスト（1892‾1983）は英国の作家、文筆家。若い頃には左派の政治活動も行っている。本書はウェストによるユーゴスラヴィア旅行記である。1934年マルセイユで起こったユーゴスラヴィア王アレクサンダー暗殺の回想から語り起こされ、執筆当時は第二次大戦前夜、ウェストが筆を置く頃、バルカンはすでにヒトラーとムッソリーニによって蹂躙されていた。流麗な英文で綴られるユーゴスラビア各地の「物語」は古代から近現代まで---歴史と神話、政治史と外交史、芸術と産業、宗教と習俗---考えられうる限りの多岐に渡っている。ウェストの博識に圧倒されつつ、語り口の詩的軽妙さ、鋭敏な洞察力、深い哲学的考察、人々を描く優しくユーモラスな筆使いに絶え間なく魅了される。本書はユーゴスラヴィアに捧げた愛の本と言ってもいい。しかし語られるのは人類全てに共通する光と闇だ。故に本書は決して古びない。ウェストは「人間なるもの」を探してユーゴスラヴィアに行ったのである。Black Lamb（黒い子羊）とGrey Falcon（灰色の鷹）が何を象徴するかは、是非本書で読み取って頂けたら。掛け値なしの名著。

ボスニア戦争以来バルカン関連本が多数出版されたが、著者たちはおしなべて本書を読んでいた。バルカンに興味を持つ人間にはバイブルのような一冊かもしれない。レベッカ・ウェスト（1892～1983）は英国の作家、文筆家。若い頃には左派の政治活動も行っている。本書はウェストによるユーゴスラヴィア旅行記である。1934年マルセイユで起こったユーゴスラヴィア王アレクサンダー暗殺の回想から語り起こされ、執筆当時は第二次大戦前夜、ウェストが筆を置く頃、バルカンはすでにヒトラーとムッソリーニによって蹂躙されていた。流麗な英文で綴られるユーゴスラビア各地の「物語」は古代から近現代まで---歴史と神話、政治史と外交史、芸術と産業、宗教と習俗---考えられうる限りの多岐に渡っている。ウェストの博識に圧倒されつつ、語り口の詩的軽妙さ、鋭敏な洞察力、深い哲学的考察、人々を描く優しくユーモラスな筆使いに絶え間なく魅了される。本書はユーゴスラヴィアに捧げた愛の本と言ってもいい。しかし語られるのは人類全てに共通する光と闇だ。故に本書は決して古びない。ウェストは「人間なるもの」について知りたくてユーゴスラヴィアに行ったのである。Black Lamb（黒い子羊）とGrey Falcon（灰色の鷹）が何を象徴するかは、是非本書で読み取って欲しい。掛け値なしの名著です。

I learned a lot from reading this book. It is thoughly researched with excellent and valid references. The book provides for a better understanding of the background for the recent wars of the 1990s. This part of the world has been and still is exploited by the world powers that create divisions among the people of these lands. Anyone interested in that part of the world, now that all of history is being re-written, should read this book.