Simon Winchester's The Fracture Zone, Greg Campbell's The Road to Kosovo Christopher Merrill's Only the Nails Remain, and Anthony Loyd's My War Gone By, I Miss It So
Secor, Laura
THE FRACTURE ZONE: MY RETURN TO THE BALKANS by Simon Winchester HarperCollins, 1999 272 pp $13 THE ROAD TO Kosovo: A BALKAN DIARY by Greg Campbell Westview, 1999 228 pp $15 ONLY THE NAILS...
...That said, real wars have just been fought on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and many of those who chronicled those wars were real journalists whose aim was not to belittle the Balkans but to expose and explain that tragedy to a mass readership...
...Refugee return is a fiction...
...So perhaps it should be no surprise that the lion's share of the misinformation and stereotyping in these books pertains to Serbs...
...It is fascinating to read...
...I bequeath percent of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...DISSENT / Winter 2002 • 137...
...And unlike Winchester, who promises far more in the way of overarching wisdom than he actually delivers, Loyd delivers more than he promises...
...Only Loyd learns the local language...
...For Loyd, there is no shame in this admission...
...I think that before this new war is over, we will look back on our Balkanism, as the scholars call it, with nostalgia and wonder: Could we really have been so arrogant and innocent...
...assuming, often, that ours was just the steady hand needed to untie the tangled threads of conflicts among peoples too implicated to do so themselves...
...It was not a question of courage," he repeatedly demurs, whenever he wishes to invite our admiration...
...And what did we see when we looked at the Balkans...
...ABETTER DESCRIPTION Of Anthony Loyd could hardly be written...
...With what naïveté had I made my trips to Belgrade, Kosovo, and Macedonia, marveling at the resilience and sacrifice I saw in many of the people who had remained politically active and resolute through terrible times...
...Their absence from Only the Nails Remain is the book's most serious flaw...
...There, the Muslim-Croat war rages...
...THESE WERE always self-regarding illusions, but the fact that they are ought to be clearer now...
...Losing his nerve at the last moment, he asks a relief-worker friend what purpose he might serve by teaching poetry amid the ruins...
...These are questions whose answers lie in politics and myth, not geography, as Maria Todorova has demonstrated...
...He is a heroin addict, a "war tourist," a voyeur who went to Bosnia ostensibly to "see a war," but just as likely, to tempt fate...
...Is Hungary Balkan...
...By the end of the I 990s, Yugoslavia's war had become something of a voyeuristic American commodity...
...The authors of the four books under review are all travel writers, but of very distinct types...
...Even more significant to Merrill's project is its specificity, which allows both the author and his reader to connect to the individual's experience in wartime—not only the physical misery, which we know well from earlier accounts, but the difficult business of maintaining one's sanity through times that are anything but sane...
...Greg Campbell is a twenty-something, small-town journalist from Colorado who seeks to uncover the failures of the 1995 Dayton agreement that ended the Bosnian War...
...But there can be no question that the presence, persistence, and personal investment of that small army of reporters from the English-speaking world raised international consciousness to a level otherwise unattainable...
...So too have western journalists leapt to that assumption— not, presumably, for its geographic validity, but because of the term's raft of suggestive connotations...
...Like his reporting from post-war Sarajevo, his depiction of these scenes is riveting and vivid...
...Instead, we find them in the nightmare realm of spooky fairy tales...
...They also feel responsible to help alleviate the agony of others...
...When Merrill manages to go to Belgrade, it is an aborted and unpleasant trip...
...What else can you DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 135 BOOKS do...
...Visas were not the only problem: the late 1990s also marked a high tide of anti-western sentiment in Serbia, which made it very difficult for Western journalists to work there...
...as writers, we have a difficult but crucial duty to distinguish between them...
...Says a psychiatric nurse in Sarajevo: "Some humanitarians had altruistic motives, just as some journalists were devoted to the truth, but others came in search of a level of chaos corresponding to what was going on in their minds...
...Loyd does not venture to Bosnia—he yen136 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 BOOKS tures to war...
...Could we have assumed ourselves so removed and immune...
...Somehow, he has managed simultaneously to obliterate himself while yet proving that he is capable of surviving absolutely anything...
...About Zagreb's most famous hotel, Campbell writes, "My memories of the Esplanade as a surreal haven are preserved within its walls, mixed into the common psychic batter that every guest has contributed to, a palpable deja vu given as a gift by the phantoms of history crowding the halls and ballrooms...
...the populations remain divided and mutually hostile...
...I cannot understand the few journalists I have met who insist that, if confronted by casualties, their job is merely to film, photograph, or report without giving aid," he writes, just before he details the only occasion in this book where he himself does otherwise...
...Todorova notes that although Yugoslays long rejected the Balkan label, today they embrace it as though Yugoslavia made up the whole of the Balkans...
...One wishes Loyd were a lesser writer...
...He has come to see mutilated corpses, to look into the eyes of killers, to imagine himself in their shoes...
...Not in the Balkans, but in that other place—the one that he, and so many of his vastly dissimilar fellow travel writers, were actually looking for...
...Christopher Merrill sets the border between Central Europe and the Balkans as far south as Belgrade...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...Campbell and Winchester are not even that lucky: neither obtains a visa...
...But the wars of the Yugoslav succession brought a resurgence of adventurers' tales from the same region, with sometimes similar overtones...
...The Balkans are "a place of mystery, paradox, and wild confusion" where "the wild and refractory peoples of the Balkans" persist in "strange and feral Balkan circumstances...
...unlike Stoker, they told not ghost stories but the depressing details of actual mass murder...
...For Kaplan, and thus for Winchester, the Balkans begin at the Austrian border...
...As Vesna Goldsworthy recounts in Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, in that period there was an explosion of novels, poetry, and travelogues set in these little known territories—lands presumed to be primitive, mysterious, and invested with supernatural peril...
...And Anthony Loyd is still out there...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...But its honesty also makes it perversely compelling...
...But that, in the end, is more than even Loyd can bear...
...He writes at a time when Kosovo is locked down under a martial law that looks more like apartheid, when the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) is ascendant, and when the Serbian poBOOKS lice exercise little, if any, restraint...
...Whom do we meet, and how do those people define their own motivations and circumstances...
...Those are the questions I began this essay hoping to explore...
...WHAT ARE THE Balkans...
...In fact, Cyril and Methodius were Greek Orthodox monks from Salonika who brought Orthodoxy to the eastern Slays...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...How much more complicated the relationship between you and the world becomes when it's your own city burning, your own flag waving, your own life upended by historic events...
...He does not labor under the illusion, for even a minute, that he has gone to a distant land to observe the horrifying (or heroic) behavior of a savage (or ennobled) "other...
...Rather, Campbell matter-of-factly chalks Bosnia up to "demagogic leaders who used these valid [interethnicl strifes and tensions to spark a war that had far less to do with longsought revenge than it did with maintaining and consolidating political power...
...Unfortunately, he makes another embarrassing mistake as he does so, protecting his Albanian host with a pseudonym, Josip, which happens to be typically Slavic...
...READING THESE four travel books about the late 1990s Balkans, I was struck by the unevenness of their quality and of their authors' insights...
...THE FRACTURE ZONE: MY RETURN TO THE BALKANS by Simon Winchester HarperCollins, 1999 272 pp $13 THE ROAD TO Kosovo: A BALKAN DIARY by Greg Campbell Westview, 1999 228 pp $15 ONLY THE NAILS REMAIN: SCENES FROM THE BALKAN WARS by Christopher Merrill Bowman & Littlefield, 1999 424 pp $27.25 MY WAR GONE BY, I MISS IT So by Anthony Loyd Penguin, 1999 336 pp $14 AT THE BEGINNING Of the twentieth century, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Balkan wars rumbled to a close, a new field opened to the West European imagination: the Balkan peninsula of southeastern Europe, a terra incognita on Europe's periphery yet touched by the Ottoman Orient...
...Perhaps then the violence he describes would be vested with less immediacy, less power...
...One is simple sensory perception: What do we as travelers see...
...Because they live in this stark setting, an eternally unconquered people...
...They assert the individual's experience against that of the tribe...
...Campbell's account of his road trip has an endearingly amateurish quality—not least because of the author's penchant for mixed metaphors and overwrought prose...
...Even more egregiously, he presumes to know the hearts of all Serbs: The 1389 Battle of Kosovo, he writes, is "a defeat every Serb remembered still, and vowed to avenge...
...If anything, it emboldens him to abandon what he sees as the relative safety of besieged Sarajevo for the volatile front lines of central Bosnia...
...The one certain Balkan nation is Bulgaria, for whose Balkan mountain range the peninsula was named...
...He is a war correspondent, but only because he happened to be on the scene...
...Loyd's moral pronouncements are nearly always self-serving...
...Perhaps such impulses— seductive, universal, frightening— could be contained, even safely visited from time to time and then gratefully left behind...
...For that, one is inclined to believe every word Loyd writes—as long as it is not about morality or his father...
...And in a civil war, the outside reporter has mobility and access that often elude local journalists, who work at much graver personal risk...
...Never is this description more apt than in war...
...And nothing illustrates so plainly the inquietude of Loyd's mind as his strange, disjointed narration of his relationship with his father...
...I believe any man, given the right pressures, could kill an innocent in cold blood," writes Loyd...
...Starting with Robert Kaplan, whose 1989 Balkan Ghosts famously defined the Balkans as "a time-capsule world: a dim stage upon which people raged, spilled blood, experienced visions and ecstasies," a seemingly endless parade of Western journalists has reproduced the stereotypes and historical clichés that so marked Western journalism about the Balkans at the turn of the last century...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...It depends whom you ask...
...A keyword search on Amazon.com under "Bosnia" turns up 694 titles...
...And yet, the mushrooming of both popular histories and war reportage from the Balkans in recent years bespeaks something more than a sober effort to chronicle events...
...Winchester actually follows KFOR into Kosovo, making him one of the first journalists to set foot in the ravaged province after the war and one of the few to witness the state in which it was left...
...the troops of the international stabilization force known as SFOR are not really empowered to enforce the terms of the peace, and they are actively forbidden to pursue war criminals...
...It is chilling...
...In an instant, my relationship to Loyd's book, and to a region that had captured my thoughts and imagination for several years, dramatically ruptured...
...And it struck me that as travelers, we constantly navigate between two forms of perception...
...He presumes his own motivation to be nearly universal: "Men and women who venture to someone else's war through choice do so in a variety of guises...
...That said, there is no fair comparison between Merrill's work and that of Kaplan and Winchester...
...10025 (212) 316-3120...
...Where do they begin...
...Unfortunately, when Winchester departs from the literal scene before him, he seems to wrench the geographical Balkans from the map...
...Winchester, Campbell, and Merrill were all writing at a time when access to Serbia was highly restricted...
...It is no accident that in tandem with this outpouring, in the last five years we have also seen a burgeoning scholarly literature chronicling the role of Western projections in shaping the perception, and self-perception, of Balkan cultures—most notably, Maria Todorova's magisterial Imagining the Balkans...
...Many journalists and photographers died in Bosnia...
...134 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 It's unfortunate to find such ungrounded generalities in the best portion of Winchester's book...
...His depiction of a lonely Croatian-run hotel with bullet-scarred walls, and of his aborted stay in Pale, the Bosnian Serb town from which he flees in a fit of paranoia, are remarkably memorable...
...Campbell spends significant time with young Albanians— the "KLA reserve," as they call themselves— and it is with courage and empathy that he bears witness to life in Kosovo under the Serbian boot...
...We deliberately stepped outside of our comfort zone, whether as a lark or as a vocation, knowing always that we could step back...
...Most poets are not especially effective nurses to the wounded, but they can certainly minister to fractured souls, administering small doses of beauty and humanity to those who suffer in their absence...
...The worst offender in this regard is Winchester...
...Campbell, who has an embarrassing habit of misspelling place names and getting historical details backward, self-assuredly writes, "In 880, Rome dispatched the nomadic priests Cyril and Methodius to complete the conversion of the western Slays—the Croats—to Catholicism...
...Wisely, Winchester does not stop the Serbian army for an interview, so it is without any empirical evidence that he offers sweeping explanations for Serbian motives: "The Serbs here in Kosovo were getting back at the Albanians, as they saw it, for what the Turks had done to them," writes Winchester...
...in fact, he has it running right through a park in the center of the Serbian capital...
...As a result, Campbell warns, Bosnia is not at peace so much as it has been frozen in a state of war...
...And so, like many that have come before them, DISSENT / Winter 2002 • 133 BOOKS these books, with the exception of Loyd's, contain a fair amount of misinformation...
...The conceit of Campbell's book is the story of his literal road trip from Zagreb, through Bosnia, to Montenegro, and finally to Kosovo...
...It's a futile hope—but not without its moments, as when a Sarajevan tells Merrill that the following lines from a Holderlin poem saved his life: "Where danger lies, salvation also grows...
...Journalists' work is never perfect and certainly never beyond academic reproach...
...How quaintly turn-of-the-century British, we might now think...
...A safe, peaceful life led them to such anxiety that only in dangerous situations did they feel calm...
...Having failed to witness combat as a soldier, Loyd makes for Bosnia with the barest credentials as a photojournalist, hoping for nothing else except to experience a war...
...He meets actual warlords and describes them as warlords...
...He knows he is there to explore the darkest reaches of his own psyche...
...As for Anthony Loyd, he is something else entirely...
...As a result, he is little inclined to rationalize, let alone to make the place the proxy for the experience he chases there...
...I was rereading Anthony Loyd's book on the morning of September 11, contemplating the voyeurism that had compelled Loyd to write it and me to read it...
...In the face of that request, lyric poets "perpetuate the oldest values on earth...
...He is dead among the living, alive among the dead...
...The only Serbs he encounters are one friendly farmer in the Croatian countryside and a number of angry, retreating soldiers as the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping forces enter Kosovo...
...And so, in a book that invokes Serbian villainy on nearly every page, and that devotes nearly a hundred pages to Slovenia, Serbia gets a mere thirty pages—not much more than tiny Montenegro...
...Among these adventurers, only Merrill takes the time to delve into the former Yugoslavia's history, literature, and culture, reading not just the work of other journalists but also that of historians, novelists, and poets...
...So far as I can tell, the answer is poetry: Merrill wants to see it perform miracles...
...But perhaps the best justification for poetry in wartime—and for Merrill's quest itself— comes from the poet Charles Simic, whom Merrill quotes: "Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder...
...others risked their lives, but survived...
...LAURA SECOR is a New York-based writer...
...A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...The other is the fog of preconceptions that rushes in to fill the void whenever we step back from the scene before us—when we cease to talk to people, when we attempt to draw conclusions from landscapes alone, when we suffuse those landscapes with our own fantasies and fears...
...From the beginning of his investigation into "the savage mysteries of this wretched peninsula," Winchester cautions the reader that the glossary he appends may be inadequate, because "it is difficult to keep strictly objective any Balkan word list—since it includes, as do most Balkan stories, many monstrous people and their deeds...
...CAMPBELL RUNS into similar difficulties when he waxes romantic about the Montenegrins: "If the ancient Balkan hostilities apply to anyone in former Yugoslavia, it's the Montenegrins," Campbell avers, having spoken to exactly one of them...
...I suspect that Americans of my generation will no longer travel to combat zones with the same sense of moral and physical invincibility...
...Compare public awareness of events in Bosnia to that of the Rwandan genocide, for instance, to which few Western journalists devoted their careers...
...Even Merrill, who is generally meticulous, revives the long-discredited myth that the Bosnian Serbs started World War I—and adds to that an entirely new and indefensible one, that Serbia started both Balkan wars...
...Rapidly, the same author would reel from riveting, empathic reportage to cringe-worthy clich...
...Otherwise, we have Romania, Albania, Greece, the countries of the former Yugoslavia, and arguably Turkey...
...It's an era that feels suddenly 132 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 BOOKS alarmingly distant: at a time when the West was not only largely at peace but regarded that peace as the progress of civilization, the Balkans represented much more than a backwater of superstition in the Western mind...
...Suddenly it is not so clear where one draws the line between courage and recklessness, persistence and fatalism, pacifism and passivity, war and revenge...
...Christopher Merrill is a poet questing for the meaning of art through a journey into the lives of poets, writers, and artists in embattled lands...
...Like the pastures and the wild flowers, Montenegrins burn with the full intensity of what they are...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...For Merrill's friends in Bosnia, however, sanity alone is not enough...
...Kosovo" garners 264...
...From the lucid, sinewy prose of his war reporting, Loyd lapses into the inarticulate sputtering of adolescent rage—a rage blind both to itself and to its object...
...Merrill's meditative and lyrical Only the Nails Remain is a book above all about individuals...
...what we do, compared to the work of scholars, is hasty and superficial, but no less necessary...
...Campbell is no tough guy: rather, he wends his way through post-Dayton Bosnia on his way to Kosovo with a slightly hysterical fixation on lurking menace...
...We passed through blighted landscapes as emissaries, whether we chose to be or not, from the seat of global power, a country in possession of much of the world's resources...
...And yet, despite or perhaps because of his verbal clumsiness and frequent bungling of factual details, Campbell has a knack for rendering his experiences with a raw immediacy that more accomplished stylists often miss...
...Her work has appeared in Lingua Franca, the New York Times, and the Nation...
...Read this book...
...but I suspect he could just as easily have written a powerful book about janitors throughout the ex-Yugoslav republics during the Bosnian War...
...My War Gone By, I Miss It So is a sick and sickening book...
...in the final analysis they all want the same thing, a hit off the action, a walk on the dark side...
...During and following the Bosnian War, journalists, including Tim Judah, Laura Silber, and Allen Little, wrote dense histories on short order...
...He becomes a heroin addict in peacetime, clean only in war...
...Others produced that crucial first generation of Bosnian war reportage—the meaty, passionate, blow-by-blow chronicles through which foreign correspondents such as Peter Maass, David Rohde, and Misha Glenny awakened the world to an unfolding horror...
...Because Merrill is a poet, most of those individuals are poets, writers, or painters...
...Most famously, Bram Stoker, an Irish novelist who had never traveled in the Balkans, set Dracula in a Transylvania he described as an "imaginative whirlpool" into which was gathered "every known superstition in the world...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 310 Riverside Drive #1201, New York, N.Y...
...Nonetheless, he makes a decent case for the fragility and ineffectiveness of Dayton on the ground...
...the reporter's account of besieged Sarajevo formed a genre unto itself...
...The Balkans, it seems, had become the dark mirror in which Westerners saw themselves without seeing themselves, as though human violence, irrationality, and sensuality could be ensconced safely in those distant mountain passes...
...Or does it top off what little appetite he ever had for peace...
...Without those journalists, would the details of the Bosnian War be known...
...It is thus especially unfortunate that Merrill did not find, in Serbia, the same caliber of contacts that he did in Slovenia and Bosnia...
...On Merrill's third trip to besieged Sarajevo, he is expected to teach a poetry class...
...Get real,' said my friend...
...A stint in Chechnya tops off Loyd's appetite for violence...
...Winchester, for no apparent reason, credits the Serbs with spreading Marxism throughout the Balkans...
...Why were we there...
...The four books under review all deal to some extent in that stock-in-trade, although all were published in 1999, either during or directly following the Kosovo crisis...
...But it is also in Merrill's book that we find this dark explanation for the work of many humanitarians and journalists...
...Rather, the region was often viewed as a preserve where savage wars were still fought, and where even Westerners could still experience mortal fear...
...Because in Serbia, too, those people existed: the individual artists, writers, and intellectuals who faced down their "tribe" in its darkest moment...
...What brought a writer as sensitive as Merrill to a combat zone...
...That is not only because Merrill has a knack for crystalline prose and stark vignettes, nor simply because he is well and widely read and takes painstaking care with both historical and observational details...
...UN general, BBC correspondent, aid worker, mercenary...
...Ours was the beneficent paternalism of a coddled global elite...
...Unlike Kaplan before them, the war correspondents had no need of recourse to melodrama...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...Mercifully, however, unlike The Fracture Zone, The Road to Kosovo does not attempt to reduce the Balkan wars to hoary myths about national character...
...September 11 rendered them, perhaps, questions for history...
...The Bosnian War was a lived experience for many people who did not choose it--among them, local journalists, writers, intellectuals, and activists—all of whom were perfectly capable of bearing witness to their own tragedy...
...he does not saddle civilians or shrubbery with soldiers' baggage...
...And although journalists are favored targets for academics because we frequently seem so unaware of our cultural biases and baggage, the work we produce—whatever its faults—is important precisely because it is history's "first draft," a rough outline in DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 131 BOOKS need of later revision, embellishment, context, detail...
...Simon Winchester is a self-described "writer and adventurer" who aspires to build on Kaplan's work, recounting a grand romantic narrative about a savage and miserable peninsula on Europe's periphery...
...It is narcissism to think otherwise...
Vol. 49 • January 2002 • No. 1
