Robert Carver (2)

I bought this at random way back in about 2000 and really loved its warts-and-all (almost all warts) portrait of the country nine months before the collapse of the first Berisha regime. Rereading now I still think it’s an admirable travelogue. Carver is in the lineage of painfully honest travelers with Smollett, Twain, Waugh, Theroux, although less comical than them. He paints a thoroughly bleak picture of the country in 1996 as a failed state, the dislodgement of the corpulent Hoxha having unleashed every variety of anarchy imaginable. He gets a lot of abuse for this, both from Albanians he meets in the book, blinkered by national pride, and in the reviews of the book online, but I wouldn’t have it otherwise. He covers a lot of ground, meets with a wide range of Albanians from soi-disant intellectuals in the South to Gheg herders in the titular mountains, and gives them plenty of room to speak.

What drags it down a star on this read is Carver’s misogyny. It’s sad to see him trying to get in the pants of a woman half his age in Tirana, and depressing to read his barely-disguised approval of the servile position of Albanian women in the home. He’s just another middle-aged guy who’s upset that feminism has taught women to say no to lechers like him.

Still, this is very well-written, grimly entertaining travel writing about a unique country at a unique point in time.… (meer)

So, in the interest of full disclosure: I'm half-Albanian on my mother's side (my grandmother was born in the US to a family that emigrated from Albania; my grandfather emigrated from Albania at a young age.) My great-uncle gave this to me a long time ago to read for a college essay - I discarded it when it became clear a few chapters in that there wasn't any scholarly material to be found.

I picked this up again during summer camp a few years back. Someone stopped me and asked "Albania - isn't that where Voldemort is from?" (Nope - it's where he found Ravenclaw's diadem.)

Anyhow:
I wanted to like this book - and maybe it's a failing of mine that I didn't like it - but a travel book where the author comes across as a huge jerk just isn't entertaining to me. Carver spends the first half of the book tiptoeing around openly sneering at the people in the south, and the second half of the book in a bit of wish fulfillment in the undeveloped north that comes across as gross once you've read 300 pages of him sucking up to embassy officials, wistfully dreaming about how the country must have been in the past, freaking out about being shot, and commenting on how he could've had his pick of (possibly underage) women looking for a way out of the country. Even if you're willing to look past all that, the snide remark he makes in the postscript about how a young man he met in Albania died during the 1997 violence says a lot. I can't say I enjoyed this, I can't say I feel very enriched for reading it, and I can't say I'm going to recommend it to anyone.

A friend of mine once said that if you're going to criticize something, you have to say something good and something bad. The something good: I think that Carver's really right about the harmful effect foreign aid can have on other countries, and does a good job of showing how the breakdown of the Communist government was a negative for the country in some ways.… (meer)

A sort of anti-travel book. After reading this you'd wonder why anyone would want to travel there. Carver's eventual exit from the country reads like a war time escape story. For all of that, there's a lot of local color here, and history, which should have made this more engaging than I found it. In the end, though, Carver's book left me with a profound disinclination to travel or sojourn there. So, if you have an interest in Paraguay this book is probably essential reading. But if you don't, it isn't, and most likely you won't, nor regret it.… (meer)