When someone as responsible as Rebecca West sets herself to write, and succeeds in writing, over half a million words about Yugoslavia, one can be pretty sure that she has more than Yugoslavia on her mind. Penetrate the fastnesses of her two cyclopean volumes called "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" and you encounter far more than an impassioned survey of the history, topography, and peoples of Yugoslavia. Here's what you will meet: glittering bits and pieces of a philosophy of history; an assemblage of characters shaped in the round by the hand of a skilled novelist; a profound meditation on the central core of Fascism; a witty running commentary on the fixed differences between men and women; soliloquies, ranging from the tragic to the humorous, on the wayward nature of the human animal; literary conversations as searching and brilliant as anything of their kind since the famous Shakespeare colloquy in James Joyce's "Ulysses;" prophecies dire and thrilling utterances of exaltation; in brief, the mind of a rich, various, and fallible being revealed in a prose of fascinating complexity and beauty….
We must understand, first of all, that this book, like others in its class, such as T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and C. M. Doughty's "Arabia Deserta," is not a mere record, however fine, of travel or adventure. It is superbly disguised personal confession. "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is as much autobiography as anything else. It arises not so much out of an interest in Yugoslavia's towns, peasants, castles, monasteries, embroideries, scandals, murders, kings, superstitions, and songs as out of an emotion inside Miss West so rich one must call it religious, an emotion that happened to find release and clarification, when she visited Yugoslavia. The country possesses for her a symbolic, almost a talismanic value. It is the Calais imprinted on her heart….
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