Yugoslavia was a country created in the aftermath of World War One, combining those Slavic Balkan principalities, Serbia and Montenegro, that were already independent, with those that were newly freed from the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires: Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia (technically freed during the Balkan Wars earlier in the decade), Bosnia, and so on (all of the Balkans except Albania and Greece). With a chip on his shoulder from the bad hand his country had continuously been dealt by the larger European powers, he spends the entire narrative going to great, sometimes comically overblown lengths, to prove the impressiveness of the Yugoslavian people. Constantine, who also works in the government's press bureau, is a larger-than-life character, moody, tempestuous, and grandiose. West and her husband made the trip, guided by the pseudonymous Constantine, actually the Jewish Serbian poet Stanislav Vinaver. I find both aspects interesting as I am fairly weak on Balkan history and I also appreciate the slice-of-life notes from the '30s, even in a country I am unfamiliar with. This very long book contains broad swaths of Balkan history intermingled with the travel stories, and notes on art and architecture (including an eye for furniture). West made several trips to Yugoslavia, and this book largely chronicles her last, made shortly before the war began. West, hospitalized at the time, was affected by this invocation of her generation's memories of the previous Balkan assassination, that of Franz Ferdinand, that lead to the First World War. Her interest in Yugoslavia was stirred by the 1934 assassination of its king, Alexander I, on a state visit to France. West was a British novelist of whom I had never heard.
When I was inspired by the Outside Magazine list of best adventure books to revisit this sub-subgenre, Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was the primary, lauded example. A thousand years ago, I read a brief interview with Neal Stephenson in the Boston Globe, and when asked what he was reading, he said he was working his way through a pile of interwar travelogues. This book is the behemoth that has been lurking on my reading list since the early autumn.
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