West is best
I am rereading Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: a Journey through Yugoslavia. Despite being only up to Macedonia and page 688 (of 1150), I do not want it to end. West may be absolutely of her time (the book was published in 1942, and is a desperate cry for liberal, humanist values at a time when those values were being annihilated), and Black Lamb may be an unashamed love song to the Slav peoples, and in particular the Serbs, but West and her writing are never trapped in the past, never merely partisan.
I must admit that I am sometimes appalled by West's assumptions (about homosexuality, for example), or her apparently simplistic judgements on whole nations or religions: Germans are bad, Serbs are good; Roman Catholicism is bad, the Orthodox Church is good. Yet although I do not share her view of men and women's essential natures (compare Martians and Venusians for a more recent, and much more crass, formulation of the idea), I have rarely read a more elegant dissection of family life as West's observation of an Orthodox religious rite:
