An incisive and affecting Yugoslavian travelogue from May to
mid-September 1991, just as the country split up and its former
republics went to war. Hall (Stealing from a Deep Place, 1988,
etc.) professes no solutions for the current Balkan trauma. Rather,
he offers an elegy of sorts for the promise of humanism and an
eyewitness account of the balkanization of mind and action. "Even
intellectuals in Yugoslavia tend to think the truth is not only
knowable, but obvious," Hall writes, and he unravels that in lively
scenes and portraits, mostly of ordinary people but also of Serbian
president Slobodan Milo??evi?? and the wearied Bosnian leader,
Alija Izetbegovi?? He describes the weirdness of Sarajevo
television news, the slant of the stories dependent on the
reporter's ethnicity. He traces the tortured rationalizations
behind Croatians' defense of their not-so-unique language. He
suggests that supportive audience members give a Serbian opposition
press conference the feel of a revival meeting. Hall has a good
grasp of the ironies of history (the Serbs claim the legacy of both
the partisans and the Chetniks, who opposed each other in WW II)
and of the present (Croatia's leading antidemocrats aren't
home-grown - they're emigres from Australia and Canada). In
multiethnic Bosnia, the microcosm of Yugoslavia, he drinks
local-style coffee with Sarajevans yearning for reconciliation,
their cosmopolitan "private dream" not shared by those in the
divided countryside. In Kosovo, Hall finds a bearded Albanian
passing as a Serb and maintaining an eight-year secret relationship
with his girlfriend from home. Only in Kosovo, Hall observes, do
old rural traditions remain intact despite the "self-vaunting" talk
about Croat, Serb, or Muslim culture. Understandably incomplete as
a tale of recent history, but a worthy aid to understanding
Yugoslavia's demise. (Kirkus Reviews)
Brian Hall journeyed through Yugoslavia in the spring and summer of
1991, just as Croatia and Slovenia were seceding and the country
was starting to slide into civil war. In this book he describes a
country in which the release of communism's iron grip and a wave of
rumour and propaganda had reopened older wounds, turning uneasy
co-existence between the various national and religious communities
into open hostility. His conversations - with farmers, artists,
defence fighters, politicians - demonstrate how intelligent,
liberal citizens can be persuaded to believe the very worst of
another person, merely because that person is a Serb, or a Croat,
or a Muslim The author was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel
Book Award for "Stealing From a Deep Place: Travels in
South-Eastern Europe".
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