HISTORY, like hate, is the product of memory, and memory is composed of unforgettable detail -- sights, smells, sounds, exalted emotions, grim statistics and cruel ironies. A memory is not subject to condensation. Made to fit inside the narrow strictures of a television sound bite or a newspaper column, it loses all meaning. It becomes just another lifeless fact that can never convey how people have come to think and behave as they do.

The Balkans are a region of pure memory: a Bosch-like tapestry of interlocking ethnic rivalries where medieval and modern history thread into each other. More complicated and less visually exotic than the Middle East, the Balkans are unsuited to the reductions of the television camera. (A recent ABC News special, "Land of the Demons," showed footage from Bosnia, but even with rock music playing in the background the effect was flat.) Whereas the Middle East is a game of checkers -- Arabs versus Israelis, with a modern history that began only in 1918 -- the Balkans are three-dimensional chess.

So in a sense the ascendancy of the Balkans as a news story in the 1990's means a victory for print over television. Yet it is not only the television correspondents who can't do much with the Balkans. Neither can the newspaper pundits, since the region is not an extension of America's own ethnic and racial obsessions, the way the Middle East and South Africa are. The Balkans are truly foreign. They require pure intellectual curiosity, nuance, not op-ed polemics. There is no getting around it. To understand the Balkans, you have to read books.

The key word for understanding the Balkans is process: the process of history and the process of memory, processes that Communism kept on hold for 45 years, thereby creating a kind of multiplier effect for violence. Balkan violence is not a phenomenon of "modern hate," like that in Algeria and the West Bank, fed by rising economic expectations and demographic stress. Southeastern Europe is a caldron of history -- of unresolved border disputes and nationality questions created by the collapse of the multinational Hapsburg and Ottoman empires.

By "process," I mean the fact that in the Balkans each individual sensation and memory affects the grand movement of clashing peoples. For today's events are nothing but the sum total of everything that has gone before. Process is something that is more emotional, physical even, than rational. It often has no direction: the asides and footnotes can be more meaningful than the main story line. You have to feel. You have to be able to imagine all the details of the past. That is why the best books about the Balkans are old and frequently eccentric -- granting access to a psychological universe that no television camera will ever penetrate.

Here is my own Balkan reading list, consisting mainly of books that, although written long ago, explain the essentials of today's violence:

Dame Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," first published in 1941, is the perfect literary metaphor for the Balkans. Dame Rebecca takes nearly 1,200 pages of small print to describe Yugoslavia. Her book is filled with the most subtle of tangents, which go on for thousands of words. By concentrating on the minutiae of memory, she illuminates how people who basically look the same, speak the same language and have virtually indistinguishable names can hate one another with primitive ferocity.

Because Dame Rebecca experienced Yugoslavia in the late 1930's, during the buildup to fascism in Croatia, she is more critical of the Croats than of the Serbs. This serves a useful purpose for the modern reader, however: it shows that the present civil war is merely the second half of one that began in the midst of World War II, only to be interrupted by 45 years of Communist rule. The Croats were responsible for much of the brutality in the first half; the Serbs are guilty now.

Dame Rebecca's clairvoyance is demonstrated by Slovenia's absence from her travelogue. As the current war shows, Slovenia has always been a sideshow to the Yugoslav drama, owing to its lack of ethnic Serb and Croat minorities and its position in the extreme northwest of the federation. Wisely, Dame Rebecca concentrated on Bosnia, and she pointed to Macedonia as the pre-eminent Balkan problem, since it is the region where territorial and linguistic disputes dissolve into an anarchy of formlessness.

Like all good books about the Balkans, "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" is politically incorrect, because it recognizes national character as historical destiny. Culturally, the Balkans may be the world's most intractable area. People are born equal there, but what happens to them afterwards -- the lies they are fed, the truths they are fed, the way they drink and the way they worship -- makes them profoundly different from one another by adulthood. For example, Roman Catholic Slovenia has experienced decades of Communism, even as Eastern Orthodox Greece has been a member of the Western alliance. Yet Slovenia's economic future appears to be brighter than Greece's. This is geography, character and history speaking, not policy.

Because the national character in question today is mainly that of the Serbs, I recommend several books, each profoundly incorrect, that take you inside the minds of some of the world's best haters.