Tony Fabijancic, a Canadian educator and writer with Croatian roots, forgoes the usual blend of ethnography, historical writing, and travel journalism in this short, sweet examination of Croatian culture.

The eloquent opening chapter focuses on the Adriatic island of Pag. From there Fabijancic visits the capital city Zagreb and the book unfolds as a series of excursions from this city to gentle, hilly agrarian regions, fishing villages, and desolate towns spanning the country. Occasionally, these regional essays (chapters on Pag, Dalmatia, and Dubrovnik) offer glimpses of descriptive brilliance. Mostly they meander through a series of brief, random, sometimes awkward encounters with the locals and their plain, repetitive lives.

Still, much of the material here is intriguing, particularly the hostility and xenophobia occasionally betrayed by the rural Croatians, which lends a dark complexity to the otherwise gentle portraits. Fabijancic also supplies, when necessary, historical background, offering brisk, balanced introductions to central Croatian figures, significant landmarks, and military struggles. The brief journalistic episodes are interspersed with reflections on Fabijancic’s life and family history.

The aimless travel practiced here poses inevitable problems or the writer, though. The text’s wandering organization obscures any singularity of vision. Rather, Fabijancic’s keen eye flits from episode to episode, curious and attentive, but never coalesces the fragments into a forceful whole.

Fabijancic appears content to leave his work undefined, and his unwillingness to organize and evaluate, to pronounce on Croatia in any structured way, makes for an unconventional read. These narrative choices allow Fabijancic to pad the rural roads, bask in the Adriatic, and feel out the psyche of this determined people, one-by-one. It makes for an interesting, if unfocused journey.