Books: Travel - Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Author: Rebecca West Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2007, 1,232pp ISBN: 014310490X ISBN: 978-0143104902 Dame Rebecca West was a travel writer who visited Yugoslavia in 1937. This book is the result of her visit and was highly praised as being a seminal piece of travel writing after it was first published in 1941. In it, it describes her impressions of the folk she encountered on her journey through the various countries and regions that made up Yugoslavia as it was at that time. Written before the days of political correctness, it is a long book 1150 pages that often comes out with some grand statements e.g. ‘The Germans have always hated the Slavs’ p.51. And perhaps it is because of its apparent direct tone that since the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia this book has experienced something of a ‘re-birth’. A number of commentators have proposed that it offers a useful background account to what happened in the 1990’s. I would suggest that the importance of this book is that its successfulness is a study in what western audiences are looking for when they read a book about this region.
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