This will be our first time visiting any part of the former Yugoslavia, and we will only be seeing Ljubljana and a short stretch of the Dalmatian coast in the brief time that we’ve got. Hopefully we’ll have the opportunity to go back for a more extensive visit another day.
Until fairly recently, I’d only ever had a vague understanding of the complex history of Yugoslavia, and of the Balkans in general. But I’d also known for years that there was one book, first published in 1941 and still considered a classic of the travel genre, which provided the best overview of the history of Yugoslavia.
Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon weighs in at 1150 pages, and it is a bit intimidating to contemplate it on the shelf. Which is probably why my own copy, purchased at Macleod’s Books some time ago, went unread for so many years. My copy, incidentally, is the single-volume edition from 1944, in the “Reduced Wartime Format”. And, to illustrate the joys of buying pre-owned books from a good used-book store, I was delighted to discover that my copy of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon had been previously owned by a “Mrs. Dorothie Derry”, once a member of the UBC Faculty Women’s Club (and before that, by a Beth McLennan Sheppard, as shown by a crossed-out signature at the top of the book’s half-title page).
This trip, our “invasion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”, provided an excuse for me to finally tackle Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and now that I’ve read it, I can’t recommend it enough. The book is based on an extensive trip that West and her husband made through Yugoslavia in 1937, when there was ample evidence that the world was on the verge of another war. In her book, West goes into every aspect of the history of that region and its peoples, leaving the reader with a much better understanding of just why the Balkans have perpetually (it seems) been the centre of so much conflict over centuries. As the Wikipedia page on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon notes, “[the book] provides a graphic account of the context of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand“, the event which sparked World War I.
I won’t attempt a full review; I’m sure you can find one online somewhere, as well as a good biography of Rebecca West, who was a formidable and much respected figure in her day. I’ll leave you with these glimpses of the title page, and the endpapers, of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:
Danube to Dalmatia 
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