robert carver travel writer

Stories from Albania – The Accursed Mountains by Robert Carver

Carver finds information about Albania hard to come by and hears only stories of thieves and murderers which turn out to not be too far from the truth. In fact, he’s only directly threatened once when two men follow him with knives and Carver manages to hide and outmanoeuvre them, allowing him to tell the story with forgiveable smugness:

‘The first attempt to murder and rob me was a hopelessly amateur affair.’

He discovers though that the Albanians he meets in the mountain villages are scared to travel and with good reason. Buses are routinely robbed by police with sub-machine guns during the day and by bandits at night. The thieves, whether unformed or not, are known to have no hesitation in gunning down the entire bus and the passengers are sometimes requited to give up even their clothes. Vengeance is swift when the identity of the thieves is known however and Carver is told one story of a policeman’s family who burned to death when his home was tracked down.

Carver is able to travel safely at least some of the time as whenever he is befriended by an Albanian or offered hospitality then any attack on him would be an attack on his host and a resulting blood feud would ensue – not something that any Albanian takes lightly. Which is not to say that blood feuds were rare – in the mountains of the north almost everyone is involved in a war with other clans. Carver learns that the town doctor recently left for a better job and before he did so he blew up an enemy’s apartment with landmines, killing everyone inside.

The stories of casual violence that Carver encounters in Albania are breathtaking. Albanian thieves are generally required to go abroad to break into homes because they know that Albanian homes are well-guarded and, if caught, he can reasonable expect to have his nose and ears cut off. Women, as always, bear the brunt of the country’s violence and are routinely beaten by their men and absolutely expect to be raped if left alone with any Albanian male.

I’ve been to Albania and didn’t see any of this but Albania in 1996 was quite a different place; people worked for a couple of dollars a day, the government had yet to bankrupt itself in a pyramid scheme, and there were immense amounts of weapons in circulation that had been stolen from the army when the communist regime collapsed. Many of the stories in The Accursed Mountains probably hold water to the present day

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Robert Carver

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The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania

Practical Data Analysis with JMP

Advanced Futures Trading Strategies

Paradise with Serpents

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Robert Carver: Writer, Trader, Investor

Robert Carver is an independent systematic futures trader and investor, writer, and research consultant. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London; and is retained as a research advisor to Stylus Capital, a hedge fund which trades digital assets systematically.

Robert is the author of :

" Advanced Futures Trading Strategies "  ( Harriman house, 2023 )

"Leveraged Trading " (Har riman house, 2019)

"Smart Portfolios" (Harriman House, 2017)

“Systematic Trading" (Harriman House, 2015)

His books have been translated into Japanese and Chinese; and are used as textbooks for several academic courses on algorithmic and systematic trading.

For more details on Rob's other writing, interviews, conferences, talks, guest lectures, podcast interviews,  and other media appearances click here .

Until 2013 Robert worked for AHL, a large systematic hedge fund, and part of the Man Group. He was responsible for the creation of AHL's fundamental global macro strategy, and then managed the funds multi billion dollar fixed income portfolio. Prior to that Robert worked as a research manager for CEPR, an economics think tank, and traded exotic derivatives for Barclays investment bank. He spent his early career in the Middle East. Robert has a Bachelors degree in Economics from the University of Manchester, and a Masters degree, also in Economics, from Birkbeck College, University of London.

Robert trades and invests with his own money using the methods you can find in his books. 

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In Stroessner's shade

Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay

by Robert Carver

376pp, Harper Perennial, £8.99

What an interesting book this is. Like the best kind of person, it is at once intelligent, charming, funny, entertaining, quirky, inconsistent, flawed, infuriating and above all deeply human. I loved it.

After a brilliant set-piece opening describing great-great-grand Uncle Charlie Carver, a maverick who vanished into the Paraguayan jungle (and subsequently metamorphosed into James Colver in the pages of Conan Doyle), Carver the younger sets out on his own journey to the landlocked republic. The size of Germany, tropical in the north and sub-tropical in the south, fertile and replete with mineral resources, Paraguay is so badly governed that it imports even basic foodstuffs. The Ministry of Railways employs 25,000 people and there are no trains at all. Officially the most corrupt country in the Americas (a hotly contested field), it is a classic kleptocracy and a model of baroque criminality. Most Paraguayans are destitute; the small elite supports four branches of Tiffany's. Everyone who can afford a gun is armed. "As tea is to China, chocolate to Switzerland or red wine to France," a shocked Carver observes soon after landing in the capital, Asunción, "so are firearms to Paraguay."

Simmering violence sets the tone from the outset. Carver is permanently afraid, and it is fear that gives the narrative its tension, as very little happens - indeed, for long periods nothing happens at all. When the author visits a travel agency, the assistant informs him helpfully: "No tourists come here because it is so horrible." Too scared even to take a bus, our hero drinks rum and puffs cheroots under clunking fans, repeatedly asserting that he is "out of his depth". He does not get out of Asunción till halfway through the book - bundled on to a boat to Concepción armed with a .38 Colt by a kind smuggler friend who has heard a coup is imminent. Terrifying though this journey is, it seems to liberate Carver from his fears, and after this he makes several forays to the interior, despite being bitten on his toes while asleep by blood-sucking bats and held at gunpoint by a senile Nazi in a smuggler's roadhouse near the Brazilian border ("My heart pounded and I wanted a piss dreadfully"). In the end his luck runs out, and he is brutally mugged, his skull smashed with the barrel of a shotgun. He loses his nerve (who can wonder), and gets out. Changing planes in São Paulo, he feels he has been released from prison.

The mini-essays on Paraguayan history that splice the travel stories are entertaining and informative, combining depth of research with lightness of touch. Carver's voice is essentially comic. He sets himself up as a weedy English male of the central casting variety (the book is dedicated to St Antony of Padua, patron saint of hopeless causes). His first and only other travel book, The Accursed Mountains, is an account of his peregrinations in Albania.

At the beginning of this new volume Carver tries to set up a comparison - "one could see Paraguay as a sort of south American Albania." Having been to both places, I can tell you this is ludicrous, but it doesn't really matter. The fact is that "Paraguay, from the first, had been a place which attracted Utopians and bandits," and its bizarre history perfectly suits the author's personality. He calls the famous Paraguayan reducciones of the Jesuits "the first and most successful examples of social engineering on a mass scale". He goes on to examine various other semi-bonkers utopian communities that have used Paraguay as an "experimental springboard, a try-out for a Paradise without Serpents, a new social order which would be universally applicable". Jokes aside, an examination of these failed endeavours leads to disquisitions on European economic models, in particular the culture of dependency fostered by the welfare state and the breakdown of organic community life. Carver notes the "cynical cruelty" of the capitalist western loan system that "battened on to the feckless poor". It is hard to disagree.

As to the flaws: there are repetitions, and errors (there are no deserts in southern Chile as described in chapter 12). I could have done without the colloquial references to "big girl's blouses" and to characters "strutting their stuff". In the final third of the book, discipline deserts the author and the prose sprawls, the jokes teetering towards the self-indulgent. There is something decadent about Carver's style. Not a bad thing, but risky.

Paradise with Serpents shows how modern Paraguayan history remains in the baleful shadow of über-dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Stroessner liked his secret police, known as the Technical Service, to cut up opponents with chainsaws to the accompaniment of the traditional Paraguayan harp. The symphony was played down the telephone line to colleagues. Since the dictator's demise, liberalisation has brought crime, inflation and a collapse of the infrastructure. Perhaps the greatest of all the tragedies Carver recounts is that Paraguayans have forgotten, as people always do, and that many are calling for the return of a Stroessner-like strongman.

Carver is a bit rightwing for me, but he has a big heart. Who, he wonders, will rescue the embattled Paraguayan underclass? The Catholic church? Not likely. "No text from the gospels," the author remarks after quoting Jesus's advice to the centurion to give his money to the poor, "had ever been more ignored by those who over the years have claimed to call themselves Christians." Yes indeed.

· Sara Wheeler's Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton is published by Cape

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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. In the late 1980s and 90s, he worked on developing East Asia-Russia business, trade and investment.

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