'Black Lamb and Gray Hawk', by Rebecca West: a book that no educated person should ignore

Cicely Isabel Fairfield (1892-1983), adopted the pseudonym Rebecca West as a tribute to the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen's drama

Rosmer House

.

She was a woman writer in the English language in hard times for women, anti-fascist, anti-communist and anti-authoritarian.

She is the author of four masterpieces - four - in various genres:

The Return of the Soldier

- with a brilliant use of point of view theory - as well as the trilogy of

The Aubrey Family

, in novel form;

Wildfire

, containing his celebrated chronicles of the Nuremberg trials, in journalism;

The meaning of betrayal

, a superb essay on the meaning of betrayal based on the English spies in the service of Nazism and communism;

and this

Black Lamb and Gray Falcon

, legendary travel book.

The catalog of her friendships was the intellectual

who's who

of the 20th century, from George Bernard Shaw to Anaïs Nin or Charles Chaplin.

His independence of character and sense of ethics fascinated men as much as they feared him.

At 16 she published an open letter in

The Scotsman

demanding the vote for women, which cost her distance from her classmates at her girls' school.

She had a stormy relationship with HG Wells, a known misogynist, with whom she had a son, and from whom she finally separated.

Her great-niece, Helen Atkinson, said that when she first went to visit her great-aunt, her parents gave her strict instructions not to mention Wells in her presence.

She was a fearless person who did not hesitate to severely criticize Tolstoy and Strindberg and called TS Eliot a fraud.

In 1947, Time

magazine

dedicated a cover to her, referring to her as “the best writer in the world” and

The New Yorker

called her the best reporter.

From the beginning the reader is immersed in the powerful, captivating and lucid writing of Rebecca West.

Already in the preface, from the harassment of the authoritarian Archduchess Sofia, his mother-in-law - mother of Franz Joseph - to Isabel of Bavaria,

Sissi

, for whom he shows a noble sympathy, to relating the murders of Sissi, Kings Alexander and Draga of Serbia and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, through whom he perceives the breeding ground that will give rise to the 14-18 war and the appearance of Nazism and fascism that will detonate the explosion of the second Great War.

These first pages already contain a warning about the kind of intelligence, expressive power and value of the trip made in those interwar years by the author, whose penetrating vision reaches at that time the motivations for the terrible war between Croatia and Serbia in 1999. 2001, as well as, in general, to the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia of Marshal Tito.

West's sensitivity and intelligence to then perceive the breeding ground of that terrible conflict that weighs on the West today, is typical of journalism elevated to greatness.

This unsurpassed sample of travel literature is going to be published in two volumes and the first has just appeared in the publisher that belonged to Javier Marías, a kind of posthumous tribute to his admired author and the editor of the rest of his non-fiction work.

“My presence in Yugoslavia,” West says in his 1937 diary, “was because I knew that the past is what shapes the present and I wanted to see how that process works.”

That is the foundation of this exceptional work.

The book is the confirmation of the inexhaustible existence of what is different in people and places, in this case the history and reality of the South Slavic peoples, considered by the West as an amalgam of violence and barbarism and always dominated by the dominant, merciless pressure. and continued by Austria and Hungary whose debt to the southern Slavs is that of having stopped the Turkish invasion of Europe with their bravery.

The secret is that the author, owner of extraordinary expressiveness and a very refined culture, offers a lesson in what it means to put yourself in someone else's shoes

to

try to understand them.

The author's observations are as suggestive as they are precise;

As an example, see her specific look at Croatian women in a Zagreb market ("They gave a sensation radically opposite to what we understand by the word "peasants" when we use it in a pejorative sense, thinking of women who have become dull to "because of repeated pregnancies and a lifetime in the service of louts in villages that swim in mud all winter").

West uses the human and landscape material of the Yugoslavian towns he travels through, interweaving it with their History, which results in a story of constant amenity as well as an impeccable version of the conflictive relations between Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Serbia. , which makes the Slavic world unfold before the reader's eyes as the result of a revealing mosaic: nationalities full of people as passionate as they are proud of the love for their land that, paradoxically, has led them to countless massacres.

It is a formidable fresco, the legacy of a unique woman and a vocational traveler that must be read carefully slowly to enjoy it as it should and is required.

A book that no educated person should ignore.

Look for it in your bookstore

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