Rating: 
Summary: Northern Albania
Review: Although at times I felt Carver's criticism, or rather sterotypes/generalizations, of Albanians were a bit harsh, I also found a great deal of truth in them. As someone who has lived and traveled extensively in Northern Albania (where the book is set) I can identify Carver. Like the author and many non-albanians that have spent time there, I developed a love-hate relationship with the country (pardon the cliche). I think he provides as objective a critique and response to his travel as possible while being emotionally involved with his subjects. Many readers (some of them Albanian) have criticized
Carver for the negative impressions that he gives of the country. My response to that is that Albanians are one of the proudest people I have ever meet and have a great deal of trouble admitting that corruption, poverty, and a great deal of violence exist within their country. Don't get me wrong, I love the country and the people. Things have changed since Carver wrote the book, some things have improved, some have got worse. The violence exists, it's still there and in many ways has intensified. I would reccomend this book to anyone who is mildly interested in the country or its history. However, remember that while reading it that many of the problems that Carver recounts exist in American and Western European Cultures....and, much like the Albanians we don't want to own them. As another reader points out, many of the words and sentences in the book are in Albanian, Italian, and Greek which didn't bother me as I have a working knowledge of the languages (and admittedly, he should have had an italian and albanian publicist look over the book, because there are several errors) I feel that it adds a great deal to the book, but may be intimidating to someone who doesn't understand these languages.
Rating:
Summary: Northern Albania
Review: Although at times I felt Carver's criticism, or rather sterotypes/generalizations, of Albanians were a bit harsh, I also found a great deal of truth in them. As someone who has lived and traveled extensively in Northern Albania (where the book is set) I can identify Carver. Like the author and many non-albanians that have spent time there, I developed a love-hate relationship with the country (pardon the cliche). I think he provides as objective a critique and response to his travel as possible while being emotionally involved with his subjects. Many readers (some of them Albanian) have criticized
Carver for the negative impressions that he gives of the country. My response to that is that Albanians are one of the proudest people I have ever meet and have a great deal of trouble admitting that corruption, poverty, and a great deal of violence exist within their country. Don't get me wrong, I love the country and the people. Things have changed since Carver wrote the book, some things have improved, some have got worse. The violence exists, it's still there and in many ways has intensified. I would reccomend this book to anyone who is mildly interested in the country or its history. However, remember that while reading it that many of the problems that Carver recounts exist in American and Western European Cultures....and, much like the Albanians we don't want to own them. As another reader points out, many of the words and sentences in the book are in Albanian, Italian, and Greek which didn't bother me as I have a working knowledge of the languages (and admittedly, he should have had an italian and albanian publicist look over the book, because there are several errors) I feel that it adds a great deal to the book, but may be intimidating to someone who doesn't understand these languages.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable reading
Review: An excellent debut work. I couldn't put it down. This is a highly readable, enjoyable and chilling account of an unexplored and lawless land right inside Europe. The postscript penned by the author was very sad to read as many of the persons whom he had met had been ambushed and killed in blood feuds. I grant that impressions about a foreign culture are always subjective and I may not believe in all that the author has written. This is a travelogue, not a Lonely Planet guidebook and this subjectivity makes it all the more interesting to read. I am sure that that many things would have improved in Albania since 1996. In fact, I have a copy of "Europe on a shoestring" by Lonely Planet and the book says that some of the towns are now completely safe for travellers.Even these days Albania is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons - Kosova, and the current ethnic strife in FYR Macedonia so one wonders if the blood feud has now been taken to an international level. The comparison with Afghanistan and North West frontier is apt. Neither Islam nor the British were ever able to change the way of life of these people. I have a few remarks against the author - 1. The author betrays his Christian bias when he extols the missionaries working in Albania and constantly refers to the pre-Islamic pagan past of Albanians. I don't think any religion teaches its followers to cheat and lie, so I don't see why Christianity is superior to other religions in this regard. The author unnecesssarily drags religion into a purely social problem. 2. I don't know if this book was primarily meant for Europeans. With so many untranslated Albanian, French, Greek, German and even Latin words/sentences, it was annoying. 3. The author can't hide his disdain for the Third World countries and seems to be frustrated that there is such a country right inside Europe. He should know that the so-called "Third World" countries had a very high culture and wealth when Europe didn't have any. Most of these countries are poor directly as a result of exploitation by the colonial powers. Even today, the tinpot dictators are funded by USA and other countries for their own strategic interests. 4. The note on the author says that he grew up partly in India and I am sure he would have been born after India's independence. His knowledge of modern geography is inaccurate. He refers occasionally to the North-west frontier of India. Dear Mr. Carver, this lawless land is in Pakistan, not in India, and we Indians thank god for that :-)
Rating: 
Summary: The accursed writer?!?
Review: Antonie de Saint-Exupery said "I have no right to say or do anything that deminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him but what he thinks about himself.
Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime". Whoever appointed mr.Robert Carver to write a book about Albania,
must be satisfied with his work!
A great job he's done at telling the truth about Albania's Albanians and also a riveting job by making up stories about Albanians in general. I am an Albanian,for example I have never been in Iceland, and if I had to write a book about Icelanders within a short time, you can imagine how accurate that book of mine would have been!!! I must admit I found this book too offensive,too unfair but it is a book and books are meant to teach us something.Anything.And it is up to you dear readers what you're gonna learn from this particular book!!! If mr.Robert Carver was appointed by whoever that is - to write another book about any other country I wish with all my heart to remind him of this adage "Two people stare from the same bar - one sees mud the other sees the stars".
And it is the STARS people are more interested than in the mud. Because stars are 'unreachable' while mud can be created anywhere! And for the end mr. Robert Carver's books will always have a spare place in my bookshelf. He's a great writer!
Rating:
Summary: "Accursed" is in the mind of the beholder
Review: As I began reading this volume, I was immediately put off by such statements as "..in Albania more or less nothing worked, nothing was available, and no one knew anything." or "duplicity and trickery were the currency of everyday life" or "Cynicism was intelligence, fairness stupidity." And to take a final, random example, "If there was one consistent trait the Albanians shared, it was to charge the foreigner the absolute maximum the market would bear." On top of such wildly general statements, the author allowed himself the use of such words as Wop and Froggy, expressing here and there his dislike of the strictures of political correctness. While not entirely disagreeing with that last point, I still don't like books that make use of such rubbish terms that add absolutely nothing to the topic at hand. So, I must say that I got off to a bad start with THE ACCURSED MOUNTAINS. I kept reading and now I am glad I did. In many ways the picture Carver draws is very accurate, and somehow, despite himself, he seems ultimately to like some of the people he meets. The further he was able to retreat into the past, the high mountains of the northern highlands where even the all-embracing Communism of the Hoxha years could not much penetrate, the happier he seems and the less likely to make sweeping negative statements. I have the ability to comment on his opinions because, strangely enough, I was travelling through Albania at exactly the same time he was--mid-1996---though not for as long. I did not have any contacts at all. The picture Carver gives of the economic situation is absolutely true--utter desolation, back to zero. As he had more political contacts, he could find out more than I did, but what he wrote rang very true to me. The politics of family, clan, and tribe had sprung back as if it had never been gone (it hadn't)and the words 'compromise', 'consensus' and 'practical program' seemed unknown. Where I disagree with Carver is in the nature of the Albanian people. Allowing for the two facts that a) the entire economy had totally collapsed and b)it was a Third World economy anyway, it was amazing to me how honest everyone was. In the weeks that I was there, nobody cheated us, only a couple minor attempts were made even to try, and desperately poor street vendors would return you the correct change even if you had understood "50" instead of "15" due to poor Albanian. Dirt poor people would insist on paying for your coffee, your drinks; hospitality was universal. Con-men existed, but primarily in the world of package tourism, which, despite Carver's denial, did seem to be getting a toehold at that time. Carver reports roadblocks where police extorted money from bus and van drivers every few miles (it seems). I travelled from north to south, east to west, on regular buses, quick vans, taxis, newspaper delivery vans, and the train, never finding even one instance of this, though wide travels elsewhere in the Third World make me aware of how common it is. Carver sees bandits on the road---oops, they are only a bunch of refugee kids. He almost gets shot on a desolate road but---oops, the pistols all fire at a target set up a moment ago. The Macedonian border was shut off but---oops, I went through it with no difficulty. I can easily share his feelings of anxiety--and equally shared the experience of being warned in America before leaving that Albanians were thieves, murderers, bandits, etc. But somehow my fears dissolved while his did not. If you don't mind living with those fears, despite the hospitality he received, the kindness of people who had next to nothing, but shared it with him, then you ought to read this book, ignoring some of the parts that try to make Albania sound much more horrendous than it is (or was in 1996). I share Carver's vision of the rising tide of desperate Third World people who are going to overwhelm the more organized countries in search of order and prosperity, thereby destroying what they came for. Albania's tragedy is yet another one, sending out floods of desperate people. There was no need to make it worse than it is.
Rating:
Summary: A Curse on the Accursed Mountains
Review: Carver's travelogue about Albania is not a work of scholarlship, and therefore may not deserve a detailed and thorough "intellectual" review. It is precisely because Carver is appealing to a popular audience that may never read anything else about Albania or Albanians that this book must be revealed to potential readers for what it actually is; a spiteful and vengeful attack on a people and their culture, consisting of sloppy and often incorrect information with occasional penetrating glimpses into a society in the throes of a painful transition. Should they have the determination to read to the end, readers with previous knowledge of the subject will react to Carver's writing with mounting anger at the hubris with which Carver delivers his diatribe. Other readers, taken by the "exoticism" of the topic, will be left with knowledge laced with misogeny, racism, and the author's profound belief in the inherent inferiority of anything Albanian. The reason to look at Accursed Mountains is to witness the power of the word when wielded so irresponsibly. This book is a prime example of journalism at its worst; proof positive that a little knowledge not only is a dangerous thing, but can be contangious when packaged and sold in this form. The flaws in Carver's book are numerous and egregious. Perhaps it is appropriate to summarize by saying that anyone traveling somewhere new in the world cannot, after two months, write an accurate ethnography (which is what travel journalism can be, at its best). Having read earlier writings on Albania, including the highly regarded works of Mary Edith Durham, Carver considers himself fully equipped to represent Albanian realities to the outside world. Indeed, he repeatedly refers to Albanians' igorance of their own history and culture, saying that, "The most ill-informed foreigner who had read one history book on Albania knew more about the reality of the past than the most erudite Albanian..." (p. 127). Within this restricted timeframe, Carver early on is already convinced that certain things are absolutely true and can be applied with impunity to all Albanians. For example, after being overcharged at a restaurant on his 3rd or 4th day, Carver concludes that "these people were crooks who lied and fawned on you for advantage, and then cheated you when they had lulled you into believing their lies" (p. 52). A recurring frustration in reading this book is that Carver occasionially demonstrates his ability for true and incisive accounts of social and political realities. For instance, he describes the growing dependency syndrom that Western foreign aid has created in Albania, something which others working in fields such as mine have also encountered in the Balkans and elsewhere. Carver is also insightful in his analysis of Albania's thriving patriarchal social order and its effect on women. Unfortunately, this insight is offset by the author's own glaring misogeny. He consistently describes women in terms of their bust size ("Prominent, unavoidably so, were also a pair of gauze-enveloped breasts, which fully deserved to be declared national monuments in their own right" (p. 154); and eventually equates sexuality with poverty: ". . . girls made the most of what little they had and love trembled in the air with the blue cigarette smoke in night-clubs thick with the reek of alcohol, testosterone, and poverty" (p. 185). The major flaw in Carver's writing, by far, is his repeated condemnation of the Albanian people as morally, ethically, and culturally inferior; both in terms of their own standards and certainly when compared to the superiority of the West, particularly his native England: While watching Wimbleton tennis on TV, he muses "How could you ever get human beings to comport themselves in such an impeccable fashion? It didn't speak of money, but of rules voluntarily obeyed, reasonable laws formulated by intelligent, civilised people with the good of the community at heart, of trust, compromise, safety and peaceful co-existence. Everything Albania wasn't, in fact" (p. 258-9). From single encounters with individuals, Carver draws vast generalizations which he applies to Albanians as a whole. His conclusions reaches range from the mundanely silly (Albanians are stupid because someone was unable to read a map (p. 29), to the grotesquely dangerous: His final summation is that Albanians are "smiling murderers and honourable kidnappers, hospitable rapists and elegant torturers, welcoming robbers and wife-beating family men, kindly blood feuders and generous headhunters, sophisticated forgerers and multilingual embezzlers..." (p. 337). The book is a concordance of negative stereotypes, which the author justifies and reinforces by referencing the opinions of numerous American evangelical missionaries he met in Albania. According to them, and consequently the author, Albania is a land awash in evil and sin. Only evangelical Christianity has the potential to cleanse "this benighted land" (and its people) of their "arrogance, chauvinism, and puffed-up pride" (p. 241). To summarize: Anyone interested in the Balkans generally, or in Albania specifically, should read this book, but not for the usual reasons. This book is a painful reminder of the damage that can be done to our field of interest by someone with little expertise but with a publishing contract. Eran Fraenkel Skopje, Macedonia
Rating:
Summary: absolutely false
Review: Dear friends. I'm an albanian guy and i lived there until a year ago and I know how it is. Some things that carver wrote are true, goverment mafia but what it's said about the people is totally untrue and very offensive against the albanian people. What about i tell the history of america by listing that two high school student killed 20 others and a guy killed and mutilate 6 people in a mc donald store.The problem is that a lot of people dont know about Albania and anything they read its interesting true and whatever.In albania maybe part of the goverment is corrupted (It happens in every post communist state) and a lot of corruption going on and maybe once in a while a group of people rise against the goverment armed (same as waco texas) and even the pay is only 100 $ for month, but a similar disgrace of the albanian people is ridiculos. (sorry for my english), So please don't beleive anything you read. Thanks With all respect Dritan Dilaveri tani@yahoo.com
Rating:
Summary: An excellent Third Book to Read on Albania
Review: Having visited Albania several times and hunted similar themes, I found Carver's picture well in line with my own. It was insights to some of the 'whys' which caught me the most. He gets a hearty well done for doing what I had hoped to in 1992 when visiting as a journalist.
Rating:
Summary: Accursed Mountains - Accursed Book?
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Eerie and well written travel journal
Review: I got this book to get a better idea of Albania since my friend was going to work there. What a great read. Details the adventures (and dangers) of one man travelling on a shoestring budget through Albania. Robert Carver always has insightful comments and an unbiased view. Recommended for anyone travelling to Albania as it details the customs and roles of both sexes in albania, the corruption of the government and pretty much the day to day life of a wide variety of people from Mafia to your herder in the mountains of the north.
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