I bought this at random way back in about 2000 and really loved its warts-and-all (almost all warts) portrait of the country nine months before the collapse of the first Berisha regime. Rereading now I still think it’s an admirable travelogue. Carver is in the lineage of painfully honest travelers with Smollett, Twain, Waugh, Theroux, although less comical than them. He paints a thoroughly bleak picture of the country in 1996 as a failed state, the dislodgement of the corpulent Hoxha having unleashed every variety of anarchy imaginable. He gets a lot of abuse for this, both from Albanians he meets in the book, blinkered by national pride, and in the reviews of the book online, but I wouldn’t have it otherwise. He covers a lot of ground, meets with a wide range of Albanians, from soi-disant intellectuals in the South to Gheg herders in the titular mountains, and gives them plenty of room to speak.

What drags it down on this read is Carver’s misogyny. It’s sad to see him trying to get in the pants of a woman half his age in Tirana, and depressing to read his barely-disguised approval of the servile position of Albanian women in the home. He’s just another middle-aged guy who’s upset that feminism and basic education have taught women to say no to slugs like him.

Still, this is very well-written, grimly entertaining travel writing about a unique country at a unique point in time.