I can understand how it was written, but the sheer depth of thinking involved staggers me.
But then there are other great works whose imperfections seem to be an intrinsic part of what makes them great, and Black Lamb is of that kind.
There are some masterpieces which appear to be flawless, the writing of which I cannot even understand – Nabokov’s Pale Fire is one. Recommending it to people isn’t always easy, because it is certainly big, and it does contain some longueurs – but somehow they become part of its genius. Let’s be honest, eleven hundred pages about the Balkans sounds unpromising, and personally I doubt I would ever have read it unless I’d been travelling to Serbia and Monetenegro myself. (I say ‘three or four’ just to cover myself – in the privacy of a personal conversation I’d have to admit that personally there’s nothing I’d rate over this.) This is going to be a long review, because I want to quote her in detail.įirst of all, let’s acknowledge what a daunting prospect it is. And so I really need to marshal my thoughts here, because I genuinely believe that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one of the three or four greatest books published in the twentieth century, and I want to make sure I present my case as well as I can. Writing a five-star review full of superlatives is always difficult: for people who haven’t read it yet, there’s no way any book can live up to the kind of praise that someone who loves it wants to give out. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to British letters. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II and Communist traitors The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. She reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. She was brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she attended George Watson's Ladies College.Ī prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Cicely Isabel Fairfield, known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic, and travel writer.
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