Impossible Country - Hardcover

Hall, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0436200325 ISBN 13: 9780436200328

Publisher: David Godine, 1994

Synopsis

This is a privileged glimpse of the former Yugoslavia from within, one that gets behind journalistic accounts to present the intimate hatreds, prejudices, aspirations & fears of its citizens. American journalist Hall spent the spring & summer of '91 traveling thru Yugoslavia, even as it crumbled in his footsteps. Having arrived a week after the catalytic 5/2 Borovo Selo massacre, he watched as political solutions were abandoned with dizzying speed & as Yugoslavia's various ethnicities, which had reached a point of tolerant coexistence, tipped into civil war. One of the last foreigners to travel unhindered thru the region, he's captured the voices of both the prominent & unknown, from Serbian demagogue Slobodan Milosevic & Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegovic to a wide variety of everyday Serbs, Croats & "real people, likeable people," he writes, who've been pushed by rumor & propaganda into carrying out one of the most intensely brutal ethnic conflicts in history. At the same time, he provides the indispensable historical background, showing how Yugoslavia was cobbled together after WWI, tracing the ethnic cleansing practices that have marked the area for centuries & explaining why every attempt at political compromise has met with suspicious resistance. With sharp eye & flawless ear, he's caught a unique moment in history in a book that is superbly researched, beautifully written, funny, fascinating & poignant.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Hall is the author of three novels, including I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, his acclaimed story of the Lewis and Clark expedition, as well as three works of nonfiction.

From Kirkus Reviews

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 Miloevi 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 ‚migr‚s 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. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: David Godine
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0436200325
• ISBN 13: 9780436200328
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1