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

Paperback - 01 April, 1995 - Penguin Classics
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By: Rebecca West
ISBN: 0140188479

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About this book

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

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Reviews by readers

Been there, done that, then read BLGF

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.

Large, masterful

Black Lamb and Gray Falcon is monumental, and anyone that has written formal fiction or non-fiction can only marvel at how West maintains control over her materials at nearly 500,000 words, and over 1100 pages. We never get the impression that she is fatigued with the work --- and there is no repetition. Even if one is not interested in travel literature, BLGF is a must read, because it one of the great examples of its genre, and as such, transcends it. For all its length, West complains that one can never fully write about a place, can never actually capture it! That nugget is somewhere on page 900, I think, and although the reader can sympathize with her exasperation, we can hardly believe her.

1181 pages too many

This book is a huge disappointment. Instead of discovering the history of a wonderful people, I found bigotry, racism, snobisness and intolerance. At page 200 or so, and after many tries to warm up to this author with her narrow-minded and slanted views, I decided to just put it down and search for unbiased history in other sources. To readers who haven't visited the Balkans, I'd suggest save your money to actually travel there. You won't be disappointed by the wonderful islands or it's people.

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