The Work of Noticing
To the Lake,
Surfacing,
Granta, 382pp, £14.99 (hardcover)
Sort of Books, 248pp, £12.99 (hardcover)
Travel writers tend to be pretty hot on the necessity of travel. ‘By a certain age, we simply get bored of the rhythm of our days,’ writes Joanna Pocock in Surrender. ‘We tire of our living spaces and how the light hits a certain wall each afternoon. We sicken at the sight of the same smudge of sky from our beds.’ This lassitude, the hobgoblin of itchy-footed funk, struck forcefully when Pocock was in her forties. Middle age brought with it the realisation that the scales were stacked away from new experiences towards memory – that ‘we have more past than future.’
‘More past than future’ is an apt diagnosis of the pathology at the heart of Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake. It is the story of her travels, again in her forties, to two lakes – Ohrid and Prespa – buried deep in the Balkan hinterlands. The lakes sit at the junction between three countries, Greece, Albania and the Republic of North Macedonia. It is a landscape of ringing beauty and dancing, bounteous light, yet Kassabova’s book is almost flattened by the weight of memory. Her maternal grandmother, brilliant, mercurial and ultimately ill-starred, grew up by Lake Ohrid and To the Lake is partially framed as an effort to understand – and exorcise – the long shadow she cast over the family. ‘The local is inseparable from the global,’ Kassabova tells, and ‘we as individuals continue to influence the course of history.’
And history is traumatic in this contested land. The region has been continually tussled over by larger powers, from the neglectful cruelty of the Ottoman empire to the internecine conflict of the Greek civil war. Cycles of exile, suffering and disappointment are visited on down through the generations, Kassabova writes. They return as readily as eye colour or the curve of the nose, carried in the ancestral DNA. A central idea in the book is Kanun, a medieval code of honour and blood feud that ravaged the Balkans. For Kassabova though, Kanun comes to stand for the burdens