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...

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.

Excellent. Very readable. Loved it

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.

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.

I returned this book

the writting is very good, the author well informed but, as another reviewer put it very well, the author is too arrogant in his approach. More you read, more you sense the dislike of the author toward this collapsed country. after all what has he expected of a collapsed country where people lived 50 years in a closed authocracy? the author seems to overemphasise the negative aspects of the people he meets but lacks to emphasized the goodness in some of the people he meets. He doesn't realy insist on explaining when people are nice to him ( like in the accursed mountains where he is fed and sheltered), but , oh my god, he goes on and on on how a fish dinner cost him $30. True, he was cheated, but it was as if he was searching for dishonnest persons all along. He also misinterprets some of the behaviours of the persons as to generalize it to a whole population, in other words he gives psychological analysis where it is obvious he lacks the knowledge to do so. i.e as he interprets the act of the doctor (who ny the way was trying to heal him in a godforgotten mountains)of taking his gun out of the room, as a way for the doctor to insure that the author does not kill himself and thus the doctor ( who is also his guide) is sure to have his money when they arrive safe and sound back in the village... maybe the doctor wanted just to avoid accidents from a loaded gun to fall and discharge itself on the guy,or just he noticed the unneccesity of a gun in a sickmans room? He goes on and on on how women are badly treated ( which I do not contradict that fact) but doesn't explain why or how come his translator on the accursed mountains is a young girl of 19. In all, this book is too pessimistic and the author does not try to find good people or avoids on writting about them.

It is unfair to criticise the author's often bleak mindset throughout this captivating and enlightening journey back in time; I for one feel that he writes honestly about what must have been a vary arduous experience. The insights he offers into Albanian life in the mid-90's are certainly draining at times when one considers how such a repressed little corner of Europe ripped itself apart at the fall of communism. I have had a strong interest in Albanian affairs for some time and I found that this is the best travelogue by far. Read it with an open mind and a weary heart for a nation which has been battered and tortured beyond belief.

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