AFTER YUGOSLAVIA

Thoughtful travels in the war-torn landscapes of the former Yugoslavia.

As a peripatetic youngster, Welsh writer Brân visited Yugoslavia in 1978, and, curious to recover her own past, she retraced her steps in 1999. She found little among the mass graves of Bosnia to remind her of her youth, but she drew a powerful lesson from her memories—namely, that people do not have a “history,” only “histories” that overlap and conflict, so that, in a place like Slovenia, a city can be at once “post-Communist and Western, rural and upbeat, Catholic and Protestant.” (She adds wryly, flinging a barb at the guidebooks, “It’s not all architecture and trees.”) In Slovenia, different interpretations of the past are a subject for polite debate; in Croatia and Bosnia, they can still easily draw blood. Brân does not philosophize overmuch in her account, which is made up of sharply observed descriptions and conversations with mostly ordinary people, as well as a few mostly unpleasant anecdotes that take place in forensics labs and along twisting mountain roads clotted with plunge-prone buses. She offers finely detailed snapshots of unexpected scenes, featuring elderly Croatians (“so decrepit they can barely lift their hands”) eating cream puffs at a sidewalk café and thereby indulging a Balkan love for sweets that borders on vice; soldiers on leave “who may, in the recent past, have done ‘bad’ things, ‘Un-European’ things”; the shattered Bosnian Serb capital of Banja Luka, where the inhabitants’ stares make her wonder whether she’s an “intruder, the enemy, or simply an object of surprise”; and the ruined countryside of central Bosnia, where, “at a particularly stunning bend in the river, a single house, its roof a tangle of spars, is reflected in the still water.”

Complex, full of conflicting voices, and often extraordinarily beautiful: an outstanding travel memoir.