Kapka Kassabova gives powerful expression to the jumble of feelings engendered by leaving a troubled area and then going back to it much later
IF MODERN TRAVEL writing was born somewhere, that place may be south-eastern Europe. A couple of centuries ago, when the Ottomans’ hold on their European territories began loosening, the region offered a frisson of excitement to many a well-born, well-educated wordsmith. Some, like Lord Byron, became protagonists in the affairs of their chosen stomping grounds as well as chroniclers in prose or verse. Others, like his companion John Hobhouse, confined themselves to observation.
Robert Kaplan, an American writer, published his influential travelogue “Balkan Ghosts” in 1993; it had been researched in the final decade of Marxist rule. Although their argument was a distortion of Mr Kaplan’s view, critics claimed that his emphasis on “ancient hatreds” made Bill Clinton’s administration queasy about intervening in Bosnia. Whatever its effect, that style of writing seems untenable in the early 21st century.
“To The Lake” is her fifth book. It is inspired by magnificent stretches of water, the Ohrid and Prespa lakes, which straddle three countries. That is a marvellous idea for a book, highlighting the fact that these million-year-old geological formations vastly predate all the nationalist passions which rage nearby. Living on the edge of these deep, mysterious waters is a defining reality for all the region’s peoples: it relativises their conflicts without resolving them.
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