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
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia FROM THE PUBLISHER
Widely recognized as West's most distinguished nonfiction work, this book describes the author's travels to Yugoslavia with her husband in 1937--a journey overshadowed by the growing inevitability of the Second World War.
FROM THE CRITICS
Katherine Woods
In almost two incredibly full-packed volumes one of the most gifted and searching of modern English novelists and critics has produced has produced not only the magnification and intensification of the travel book form, but, one may say, its apotheosis. Rebecca West's Journey Through Yugoslavia is carried out with tireless precipience, nourished from almost bewildering erudition, chronicled with a thoughtfulness itself fervent and poetic; and it explores the many - faceted being of Yugoslavia - its cities and villages, its history and ancient custom, its people and its soul, its meaning in our world."-- Books of the Century; New York Times review, October 1941
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