The Accursed Mountains: Journeys In Albania [Paperback]

Albania is one of the least known and most interesting places in Europe. But after reading this you are going to be none the wiser about it. Carver seems to have spent the six weeks or so researching this book in pretty much constant fear of robbery or worse. The resulting work is relentlessly and boringly negative. He arives there evidently thinking himself a modern day Leigh Fermour (who quite bizarrely adorns this book with an endorsement). Carver, to recall Lloyd Bentsen, you are no Patrick Leigh Fermour.

Carver's attitude renders him incapable of getting beyond his prejudice. Unfortunately he does not seem to be equipped with the open mindedness and clarity of thought for which Fermour and so many other writers are rightly famous. As for being bothered to learn any of the local language, or anything about the culture forget about it. He neither has the time, nor clearly, the inclination to do so. As a consequence while we read some amusing anecdotes about expats' antics with their girlfriends, we learn precious little about Albanians except they are grasping, dishonest, criminal etc etc.

I lived in Albania for three years. It is not the easiest country. But it is constantly fascinating. An ancient people with an ancient language, a land of catles and legends. It is the only country during the war that saved all its Jews, the only truly tolerant Western Balkan country ( no mass graves here). But we learn none of that from Carver, just a repeat of the tired old cliches. I was never robbed, stolen from nor murdered in my time there, and know literally no-one who was.

I note that his most recent book has him worrying his way through Paraguay, with unfortunate results. It may be that now Carver has had the time to appreciate that adopting the attitude he took with Albania is unfair and misleading.

It is incredible that this remains the only travel work on Albania in the last ten years. It deserves so much better.

I bought this book because of the recommendation on the cover from Patrick Leigh Fermor. But where Fermor, in his books, is enthusiastic, interested, and openminded, Carver is negative, insensitive, and arrogant. Certainly, it is fair to be ruthlessly critical when writing about a country you have visited. Politically correct blindness doesn't make for worthwhile books. But while Carver's analyses of Albania's problems are interesting in print, it is difficult to see what he hoped to achieve by telling some of the poorest people in Europe - people who fed him, housed him, and befriended him - to their faces, that Albanians seemed to him lazy and dishonest. When invited for a meal in an Albanian house, he flatly contradicts anything positive his hosts have to say about their country. Another time, he congratulates himself on managing to silence an over-talkative host with scatological stories which outraged the man's cultural taboos. A couple of pages later it transpires that the man in question, who earns $45 a month, had invited him to spend a night at an uncle's house, refused to take any payment, and has tried to pay all the expenses of the journey.

Carver lays great emphasis on honesty, but very little on good manners, or on getting along with people. It is not surprising that he didn't like Albania or its people; they probably didn't like him either. His rudeness was not calculated to bring out the best in the people he met, and his view of Albania is therefore necessarily one-sided and incomplete.

This book SHOULD have been interesting. The author is well-informed about Albanian history, and he writes well. Some of his analysis of the situation in Albania at the time of his visit is well thought out. But humility, and some warmth and interest towards the country being visited are almost essential to good travel writing. Alternatively, the author should at least be funny about their tribulations, and be able to laugh at themselves too. In this book, I was amazed at the amount of humourless bitterness that the author managed to eke out of one fish dinner for which he was overcharged ($30 for three people). Someone who is so little able to deal with the normal petty annoyances of life should never have become a travel writer. Carver should have stayed at home.

I am very sorry to say: The book did not keep to its promising ads. I am very disappointed to see a country and a people to whom I grew tenderly close to be dragged in mud deeper than the ditches beside some roads.

I was indeed admiring the powerful use of descriptive language - positively a strenghth of the author. Surely you have to pay respect to his attempt travelling to unknown country, with unknkown inhabitants, and unknown and strange language. Mr. Carver, did you, or not, learn that language? I did not develop an idea how advanced you are in Quhe Shqipe (Albanian tongue).

You destroyed your compelling description of what you experienced by attempting to judge, to weigh, to moralise! Poor Albanians, with such friends you don't need no enemies!

I married in 1994 a young lady from Tirana, and since then I was visiting Albania about two times per year. Alright, I did not make friends in that North as Mr. Carver was travelling, my major contacts are people from Tirana. Yes, these are two different worlds. However, I think I can justly say that I got a certain insight into the contemporary Albania. Thus, I cannot follow the conclusions as drawn in the book in question.

The biggest fault of the author is to take side of Sali Berisha, the previous heart surgeon and personal physician of the late dictator Enver Hoxha who then appeared as President of the new Republic Albania. How can a foreigner address the Prime Minister of any country as "jailbird" without any proof of that verdict? why is there no attempt to explain why Fatos Nano was imprisoned? Why doesn't he tell that there is another interpretation of the event when one Member of the Albanian Parliament badly injured a fellow-colleague from the opponent party. Carver just names that as politically motivated. There is another reason to be quoted: Just a personal settlement between enemy families. Yes, we see such deeds as, to be careful, strange, but that does by no means give us the right to see Albanians as minor to us, as unable for so-called democratic behaviour. No, Mr. Carver, murder, corruption and other crimes are the bitter normality in our allegedly high-developped West too.

That very Mr. Berisha still is attempting to jeopardise the slow steps of the new government towards normalisation. Wasn't it under Berisha's regime that people were badly beaten on open street amidst the city of Tirana, something that allegedly did not even happen during the long Hoxha dictatorship? Wasn't it the regime Berisha that ran the country even below ground as we all remember the break down of the pyramid systems in 1997? Wasn't it the regime Berisha that allowed a wide system of bribing, and through this destroy the look of the nice parks of Tirana by allowing obscure people build up obscure coffee and other shops?

Wasn't it that "jailbird" Nano who started with, and his successors who successfully continued to remove these tokens of personal greed and stupidness?

No, from personal first hand experience I cannot at all confirm the description of Tirana in 1996 as given by the author. The more I advanced in that book, the more I became upset; several times I was close to just dropping it without reaching to the end. It was a drag to finalise the reading. All the time I was asking: What does Robert Carver want?

Does he want to give us a traveller book: but why does he have to take questionable judgments probably given by his accompany without further research (at least I did not see any signs of such attempts)?

Does he want to give a political analysis and conclusions: but why doesn't he quote from reliable sources, or give any other proof of good journalistic research?

Does he simply want to drag down a fragile country in his Western (or British?)hybris?

No Mr. Carver, with that pile of paper titled the Accursed Mountains, you don't help Albania. You missed a chance both to gain reputation, and to open the hearts of the readers towards Albania. If you had only been stuck to your compelling description without giving away verdicts, you would have created a script worth to be listed amongst the best traveller books. However, for me you left but anger and disappointment.

Even with this review, I have given too much honour to a on one side superfluent print that does by no means contribute to understanding the most difficult situation of a poor, extremely beautiful country with proud, extremely hospital people who nevertheless do not yet stand together enough to lift their country out from the deep ditch of corruption, smuggeling and other crimes.

Readers who want to get an idea of Albania, please refer for instance to Edith Durham, or to Malcolm's huge work of quoting historical sources without attempting to take any side, a highly volume of a book called "A Brief History of Kosovo", and to his wide list of literature. Or even better: Pay yourself a visit to an interesting, beautiful country, and be generous not to comment on every piece of trash you may find, the lack of well-functioning infrastructure etc. Better bring in some money through your visit, thus giving a hand to a suffering people that shook of the yoke of heavy oppression and is striving to find connection to the rich West whom Albania wants to close-up, and we should help to help themselves.

Yours

Reinhard Grossmann, a man who is proud and delighted by being married to a fine Albanian lady, and forever indebted by the deep friendship of her, and now his, Albanian relatives and friends.