Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #274511 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Synopsis
Travelling by bus, on foot, by mule and horse, staying with Albanians in their houses and crumbling Stalinist tower blocks, Robert Carver meets Vlach shepherds and village intellectuals, ex-Communist Special Forces officers and juvenile heroin smugglers, missionaries with jeeps and light planes, and ex-prisoners of Enver Hoxha who have spent 45 years in the Albanian gulag. In the remote villages of the Accursed Mountains of the far north, he is the first Briton seen since World War II, when Intelligence officers were parachuted in to help fight the German occupiers. On his journey to Lake Gashit, high above the snowline on the Serb-Montenegrin border, Carver survives murder attempts and suicidal bus rides. He sees villages last visited by outsiders in 1933, which had effectively been hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world.

Customer Reviews

An interesting subject is obscured by the writer's arrogance
I bought this book because of the recommendation on the cover from Patrick Leigh Fermor. But where Fermor, in his books, is enthusiastic, interested, and openminded, Carver is negative, insensitive, and arrogant. Certainly, it is fair to be ruthlessly critical when writing about a country you have visited. Politically correct blindness doesn't make for worthwhile books. But while Carver's analyses of Albania's problems are interesting in print, it is difficult to see what he hoped to achieve by telling some of the poorest people in Europe - people who fed him, housed him, and befriended him - to their faces, that Albanians seemed to him lazy and dishonest. When invited for a meal in an Albanian house, he flatly contradicts anything positive his hosts have to say about their country. Another time, he congratulates himself on managing to silence an over-talkative host with scatological stories which outraged the man's cultural taboos. A couple of pages later it transpires that the man in question, who earns $45 a month, had invited him to spend a night at an uncle's house, refused to take any payment, and has tried to pay all the expenses of the journey.

Carver lays great emphasis on honesty, but very little on good manners, or on getting along with people. It is not surprising that he didn't like Albania or its people; they probably didn't like him either. His rudeness was not calculated to bring out the best in the people he met, and his view of Albania is therefore necessarily one-sided and incomplete.

This book SHOULD have been interesting. The author is well-informed about Albanian history, and he writes well. Some of his analysis of the situation in Albania at the time of his visit is well thought out. But humility, and some warmth and interest towards the country being visited are almost essential to good travel writing. Alternatively, the author should at least be funny about their tribulations, and be able to laugh at themselves too. In this book, I was amazed at the amount of humourless bitterness that the author managed to eke out of one fish dinner for which he was overcharged ($30 for three people). Someone who is so little able to deal with the normal petty annoyances of life should never have become a travel writer. Carver should have stayed at home.

Captivating and absorbing
The author does not pretend to be an Albania expert (he makes it clear he went to Albania at someone else's suggestion) and sets out to simply describe what he saw, did and felt. He is emotional and certainly not of the most tactful, leading to some unnecessarily barbed remarks. But should he have pretended everyone he met was good and sweet? Should he have told the Albanians comforting lies when they were discussing their country's situation? Should he have overlooked the fact that so many Albanians were desperate to leave their home despite having nowhere to go? He well describes the feeling of being bowled over by the combination of beauty, poverty, chaos and decency that he sees. He constantly reminds himself and his readers that this third-world country is located near some of the richest and safest places on earth. The book contains plenty of honest and often admirable Albanians, such as Gabriel's father, Popi, Mr and Mrs Rahman, Mr and Mrs Andreas, Dhori, Dhritero, Mimoza, Angeliki, Tybalt, Rustem, Rafiq, Peter, Major-Dr Bajraktar, Pietri Ndrek, Mehmet Yezidi. I was totally absorbed in the book's decription of this country, so weird and exotic to most Amazon customers, and recommend it to anyone interested in the Balkans.

The land that time forgot
A really amazing book. Robert Carver takes us on a journey to the land that time forgot. His description of the way of life in 1996 reminds the reader of something from the middle ages. A land and time where life can end with sudden violence over something that appears trivial, where law and order are in short supply, and where codes of honour dictate blood feuds. All the developments in civil society that we take for granted appears to be absent. Carver's style of telling the story from the points of view of the local people presents an account which is very human, very convincing and gripping.