Another Fool in the Balkans: In the Footsteps of Rebecca West

by Tony White

In this engrossing and timely book, Tony White explores both South Eastern Europe itself, and the Western European fascination with "the Balkans". Following in the footsteps of Rebecca West--whose engaging and seminal travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: a journey through Yugoslavia, was published in 1945 and is still considered a masterpiece--in addition to other key contemporary writers and commentators, White paints vivid and revealing pictures of the cultural lives and landscapes in this fascinating region; drawing on the views and ideas he finds there, and extensive interviews with politicians, writers, and artists. The Balkans are often unjustly depicted as a barbarous bridge between Europe and Asia, a territory that just can't help itself. Even sympathetic Western European writers have often "taken sides" in the way they've depicted this astonishing part of the world. White has gone in search of humor and humanity, as well as the historical background to these common misconceptions--though all the while he's conscious that he may well be just another fool in the Balkans.

Genres: Nonfiction

255 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2006

About the author

Tony White (born 1964, Farnham, Surrey) is a British novelist, writer and editor. Best known for his novel Foxy-T (Faber, 2003), described by Toby Litt in 2006 as his 'favourite British novel from the past ten years', White has been called a ‘serious, engaging voice of the modern city'. From 2010–2018 he was chair of London’s arts radio station Resonance FM.

White's most recent novel is The Fountain in the Forest (Faber, 2018).

White's first novels Road Rage (Low Life Books, 1997), Satan Satan Satan (Attack Books!, 1999), and Charlieunclenorfolktango (Codex, 1999) – 'bizarre, depressing and unreadable' (LRB) – have been located on the ‘marginal terrain of avant-pulp’, where writers such as Stewart Home and Victor Headley 'channel the energy and drive of pornography, the skinhead paperbacks of Richard Allen and the cartoon anarchism of Leo Baxendale's Beano comics to escape the stylistic and rhetorical corsets of the metropolitan novel'. In 2006 the Russian publisher, T-ough Press faced criminal prosecution for publishing Russian language translations of Satan Satan Satan and Road Rage.

Both the title and the triangular relationship at the heart of Foxy-T recall D. H. Lawrence's 1922 novella The Fox, but it was White's use of a hybridised, street language of London's East End in which the novel is entirely written, which drew most attention.[6] Some reviewers referred to it as ‘broken, rhythmic patois’, or ‘Benglish’, and White was interviewed about his use of language by Ed Stourton on Radio 4’s Today programme. White himself has written that it was the

“language that I was hearing all around me in east London at the time, where white, Asian and other mainly (but not exclusively) young people were adopting or hybridising Black British language and in so doing were disrupting what had been the very necessary identity politics of the 1970s and 80s: a disruption typified for me by young Bangladeshi rudeboys calling each other ‘Rasta’ and most easily illustrated by the fact that it became impossible to determine the ethnicity of an unseen speaker (e.g. someone sitting behind you on the bus) by the sound of their voice.”

White’s novella, Dicky Star and the Garden Rule (Forma, 2012), was commissioned to accompany a series of works by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson reflecting upon the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Set in Leeds it was written using an Oulipo-style constraint, in this case a 'mandated vocabulary,' with each daily chapter told using all of the answers to the Guardian Quick Crossword from that day in 1986.

Another novella, Missorts Volume II (Situations, 2012) was published as a free ebook to accompany White's Missorts app, a permanent, GPS-triggered, immersive soundwork for mobile phones that is activated in the Redcliffe area of Bristol as a public art work. Missorts Volume II follows the lives of four characters affected by a derelict former Royal Mail sorting office adjacent to Bristol Temple Meads railway station.

White co-edited the short story collection Croatian Nights (Serpent's Tail, 2005), with Borivoj Radaković and Matt Thorne, which featured both British, Croatian and Serbian authors, and Britpulp! (Sceptre, 1999). His own short stories have appeared in various periodicals, exhibition catalogues and collections including All Hail the New Puritans (4th Estate), edited by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne.
Other Work

In 2006 White’s Another Fool in the Balkans: In the Footsteps of Rebecca West (Cadogan, 2006) was published; a travelogue 'from Belgrade to Split, reporting the words of a people confused by shame, pride and hope, trying to make sense of brutal murder and hatred, managing to create something universally valuable from their lives and their history' in the post-Yugoslav republics.

From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Whi...

Reviews

[Anton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting book for me, especially since I've been trying to get to know some recently discovered relatives in that area of the world. It turns out that my father was the son of a Croat-Serb marriage and that his relatives on both sides rejected the married couple, thus pushing them to come to the U.S. Oddly, the same thing happened on my mother's side, with her mother's mother and father, only there it was Northern Ireland. A Protestant man married a Catholic woman.
Am I cursed? Well, it certainly seems as though Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia have been cursed. The religious and ethnic hatred seems to be as bad as any hatred between any two races I've ever heard of. This book examines the efforts of the survivors of the war of the 1990s. It's well written and whetted my appetite by introducing me to several people, including artists, writers, poets and film makers, who I now need to get to know more about. Lucky for me I'm still young.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up on a whim at a Belgrade bookstore. Disappointing. The writing was a little dull and there was not nearly as much historical context as I had been hoping for.