Idiocy is theįemale defect: intent on their private lives, women follow theirįate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in Her question made me remember that the word “idiot”Ĭomes from a Greek root meaning private person. Has been assassinated.” “Oh, dear!” she replied. “Switch on the telephone ! I must speak to my husband at once.Ī most terrible thing has happened. I rang for my nurse, and when she came I cried to her, Had been assassinated in the streets of Marseilles that morning’. At the book's beginning she recalls being in hospital in 1934, and hearing on the radio ‘how the King of Yugoslavia It's not a book to bolt: full of fascinating detail, often very funny in a mordant kind of way, and advancing several key Westian ideas: for instance that women are idiots and men lunatics. I'm reading it at the moment, in between other things.
Magnus it certainly is: it's more than 1100 pages long, rich and detailed throughout more a meditation on how history shapes the present, and how both factor in specific identities, societies and cultures. It is as relevant today as ever it was.There's a consensus among critics and readers that Rebecca West's enormous travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941) is her magnum opus. First completed as Yugoslavia was plunged into political turmoil, followed by invasion and four years of merciless civil and partisan warfare. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was hailed as a masterpiece when it first appeared in 1942 and became, according to her biographer, Victoria Glendinning, 'the central book of her life' - a work not only of history, archaeology, politics, conversation, folklore, prophecy, and the vocation of landscape, but the work in which Rebecca West formulated her views on religion, ethics, art, myth and gender. It is a work of enduring value that remains essential for anyone attempting to understand the enigmatic history of the Balkan states, and the continuing friction in this fractured area of Europe.
A new edition of a travel literature classic introduced by Geoff Dyer First published in 1942, Rebecca West's epic masterpiece is widely regarded as the most illuminating book to have been written on the former state of Yugoslavia.
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