This is a well-written, readable, and utterly fascinating travel memoir about one of Earth's most enigmatic nations.

The NYRB edition of Hav is two books in one. Last Letters from Hav compiles anecdotes from Morris' six-month stay in 1986, immediately before the devastating intervention. I'd call it breezy-yet-erudite -- in between recounting the history of the crusades, imperial Russia, and Marco Polo's reaction to the bizarre House of the Chinese Master, she's chatting up local eccentrics and sharing meals with various ethnic enclaves. Hav at the time was clearly agglomerated from a staggering variety of historical/cultural/religious strata, many of them quite obscure (an obscure Muslim sect with its own caliph, interwar German modernism, even Cathars!). If it wasn't a real place, Borges or Eco or someone would certainly have invented it.

Part 2, Hav of the Myrmidons, is more melancholy in tone and perhaps a bit rushed, encompassing just six days in 2006. It seems that the 1986 war and subsequent influx of Chinese investment rewrote Hav into something closer to Dubai or Baku than Trieste. Migrant workers are flown in from Pakistan, wealthy visitors are semi-voluntarily relegated to a glitzy, labyrinthine, resort called Lazaretto! (an 'exclamatory' experience), once rare snow raspberries are now a GMO cash crop, and the formerly cave-dwelling Kretev people now live in air-conditioned apartments. The new government is quasi-authoritarian and fixated on manufacturing a new ethnic identity grounded in the pseudo-historical idea that Hav was founded by Mycenaeans. Even so, with a bit of digging she manages to reconnect with many of the people she wrote about in Last Letters. The old Hav isn't dead, but it's not exactly alive either.

Good travel writing should aim to be the next best alternative to visiting a place for yourself, and Morris meets the mark. She has a gift for evocative details that linger in one's memory: the graffiti on the Iron Dog, mysterious Assyrians guarding the caliph, the radio masts over the British agent's house, a bird in the spiraling escarpment tunnel, the sweat-soaked agonies of the roof race.

The dominant mood in both books is of inscrutable forces acting under the surface that Morris can never quite access - there's an almost Pynchonesque feeling of indefinitely layered conspiracy. Like the myriad factions in neighboring Syria, the participants in the 1986 intervention are basically inscrutable to me. I was hoping this book might offer some insight, but Morris makes no effort to spare readers the sense of bewilderment she experienced. These last chapters, in which the guards outside the governor's palace have traded their traditional uniforms for camo and unmarked black jets fly low over the city, are profoundly chilling.

Anyways, I think I would have liked to visit the Hav of the early 80s. Modern Hav not so much, though I guess I'll enjoy having slightly more context on the rare occasions when it appears in the news. In any case, I'm glad Morris' book exists as a record of this strange & wonderful place. Highly recommended.