The Accursed Mountains: Journeys In Albania

One of the best travel books I have read, this is immensely vivid and full of colour, brilliantly written. That said, the Albania it describes - a country in tumult, on the verge of anarchy - does not exist any more, speaking (admittedly) as a tourist who visited Albania in early 2018. Ironically, while the citizens of Tirana warned us not to travel to the lawless towns of the North lest we be mugged, raped and murdered, when we got there the place was about as threatening as an Irish border town, and the biggest danger was the fatty salty food and the very dodgy driving. Other reviewers feel he was mean to the Albanians, portraying them as lazy and obsessed with money and honour, but I did not get that impression. I visited Poland just before the fall of Communism and many of the aspects of the society the author describes are familiar - the crumbling infrastructure, the apathy and impotence of the people. Albania has changed since then, thank God, but I feel this is a very credible picture of the country during one particular epoch...

Excellent. Very readable. Loved it

Quite superb, yet disturbing, book. Hard to believe that Albania was part of Europe, let alone so backward a relatively few number of years ago. One of these "can't put it down" books.

A very well written and highly entertaining travel book. Some reviewers are complaining about factual inaccuracies in the text, but it's a travel book and not a travel guide after all.

I returned this book

Robert Carver visited Albania in the late 90s.He captures a strange lull between Communist dictatorship and true democracy, when almost all Albanians looked to the west to sort out their problems, but felt totally unable to take any initiative of their own. The resulting anarchism and gangsterism, combined with feudal blood laws, made Albania a very dangerous place to travel for the owner of a foreign passport and foreign currency. Carver evokes a country that is lost in a feudal mire where individual ingenuity and family ties enable people to get through their daily lives, but forward planning is impossible, and the only dream is to escape to somewhere else. It sounds depressing and it probably is, but it is strangely fascinating to read about a country which is so foreign, while being physically so close to modern Europe.

In the pocket of his increasingly tatty travel trousers Robert Carver carried an impressive business card during his 1996 passage through Albania: it said `Freelance BBC Broadcaster - author - film-maker' (in 7 languages) to establish his credentials where necessary. `The Accursed Mountains' is his fabulous account of the country post-communism and pre-anarchy of 1997. It is a personal travelogue with rich seams of the land's history running through it. Having lived in Albania myself for a decade, it is with some self-reproach that I took so long to arrive at reading it. Carver's observations are highly insightful about the culture, funny and at times painfully déjà vu to read, like how, as a foreigner, he got financially skinned at a fish restaurant on Lake Pogradec... poor man. He writes poignantly of one refugee being evicted off a bus near Leskovik and left at the roadside `staring at us as if at a passing lifeboat in mid-Atlantic'. He records a Greek taxi-driver's description of Albania as: "...just like Greece used to be after the civil war. No cars, much poverty, broken houses, donkeys and mules, no work, but... but..." "...a sweetness?" suggests Carver. "Yes, a sweetness," the driver replies. He writes of the whole place resembling the post-war Italy of Vittorio De Sica's film `Bicycle Thieves', and of the surreal aspects of `90s Albania: a brown bear chained up outside a gynaecological clinic in Tirana, and the broken neon lights of `Ali Pasha's Disco-Boogie Club'. Though at times what he records strikes a relentlessly bleak, even brutal tone, it is nevertheless not unfair: the cruelty in the country's past; the tragedy in its present; the ruined, shabbiness of everything then were so. Albanians, though, are given occasional voices for a reverse assessment. One woman says of Britain after she had just holidayed there: "Very clean, very rich. But there is no family life and everyone works so much, all the time. And the women are hard, like men, and the men are soft, like women. In England the women are beating the men, I think," she says. His respect for the missionaries who helped him around the remoter north comes through, despite the insinuation that two of them in Bajram Curri, `the Dodge City' of northern Albania, were probably CIA agents. The postscript `where are they now' raises an ache to know that the cast of characters Carver met were okay, that they made it out of the ensuing chaos of '97 alive. Some of them didn't. His mountain guide, Major-Doctor Bajraktar, was ambushed and murdered whilst gun-running for the KLA. And what really happened to `Natasha of the nomenclature' in the UK? It was with some delight that one central character was discretely pointed out to me, alive and well in August 2013, just a few feet away in a crowd. "No... it can't be him... is it really?" I said. "Yes," my confidant assured me, "That's him." This is a vivid and perceptive travel narrative from an erudite writer who wowed me with his capacity to repeatedly nail things so well. It holds its own with the works he refers to, Edith Durham's `High Albania' and Julian Amery's `Sons of the Eagle', on the top shelf of British sojourners in the country. A book by the reviewer set in Albania: The Silencer

This is an awful book, full of prejudice by an author with a penchant for thinking that his (scarce) culture is superior to anybody else's. A sad account of personal ignorance and total lack of introspection on the real life of Albanians in the aftermath of the fall of Stalinism.

first, let me say that i love to travel without maps, and to places deemed weird or scary (but not "dangerous" for example, chechnya, afganistan, etc won't be on my travel itinerary for the near future ) however, several years ago i was staying in southern italy's beautiful puglia region, sitting on the beach, when i asked about some interesting cloud formations on the distant eastern horizon that seemed to be stationary. i was told they weren't clouds, but the tops of mountains in albania! this blew my mind, i never thought such high mountains existed there, in addition, i am attracted by small out of the way places. i asked around, and most italian's have a very negative bias against albania, most to the drift that if i went there i'd never come back, etc. so this kind of ignorant gibberish draws me in further, and without much to go on, i ordered this book from amazon, while i was there. the book seemd to reinforce the weirdness that my italian friends attributed to the place, and i was soon looking for a way to get there. needless to say, once i got there, i could understand some of the author's opions, but as a whole, his point of view is very unbalanced. in fact, i ended up staying for a while longer, learning the language, and finding work with an italian dry goods importer, as the country was undergoing an unfortunately short term boom.

Excellent book on Albania