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Trilogy #1
A Time of Gifts
In 1933, at the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on an extraordinary journey by foot—from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the first volume in a trilogy recounting the trip, and takes the reader with him as far as Hungary. It is a book of compelling glimpses—not only of the events which were curdling Europe at that time, but also of its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers, the sun on the Bavarian snow, the storks and frogs, the hospitable burgomasters who welcomed him, and that world's grandeurs and courtesies. His powers of recollection have astonishing sweep and verve, and the scope is majestic. First published to enormous acclaim, it confirmed Fermor's reputation as the greatest living travel writer, and has, together with its sequel Between the Woods and the Water (the third volume is famously yet to be published), been a perennial seller for 25 years.
321 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
About the author
Patrick Leigh Fermor
48 books512 followersSir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, OBE, DSO was of English and Irish descent. After his stormy schooldays, followed by his walk across Europe to Constantinople, he lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago acquiring a deep interest in languages and remote places.
He was an army officer who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II.
He lived partly in Greece in a house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire.
He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".
He was an army officer who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II.
He lived partly in Greece in a house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire.
He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".
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August 25, 2011
I’ll have whatever this guy is having. Yeah, the one making the embarrassing noises and eating ambrosia without a care in the world. This ridiculous guy right here. Fermor is kind of my hero. He represents something I've always envied. You know those people who can make a thing, an occasion out of anything, out of doing errands if they must? It’s not just an Always Look on the Bright Side of Life (da da da dah dah da dah da!) thing, it’s a way of not letting a surface presentation of boring be the end of it. Their minds are always working, and can always find something to think about, even at the most mediocre of tourist traps, even at the most average performance of the thousandth rendition of Pachabel’s Canon they’ve been forced to listen to.
Fermor is one of these people. I mean, he tries his best to minimize the reality of it, but he walked across the north of Europe in the depression ridden 1930s in the depths of a horrible winter, where snow covered the otherwise picturesque scenery and where Hitler was in charge. He slept in barns covered in ice, had his belongings stolen, had to go door to door peddling his sketching hobby in order to feed himself, and again, need I say it, NAZIS. This trip could have been a nightmare, or he could have sketched it as one. Who would question that in a narrative written about Europe of 1933, with the clouds closing in? But instead of touting himself as a prophet or a self-important chronicler of the troubles of the interwar years, Fermor makes himself a magician. He is the Guide, the Gandalf, the ghosts of Christmas Past, the curator, the Brothers Grimm, the wise child who knows the way through the woods. There is darkness, but it is the kind of darkness that the story needs, a supportive depth that allows us to appreciate the worth of our Guide.
Fermor has two gifts that allow him to do this. One is a breathtaking capacity for rapture. I can think of no other word for it. He is able to section off a moment and a place and rope it away from the world and declare it Divine. Guy Gavriel Kay, the great Catholic authors and mystics down the centuries, Woolf in her own way, a few others- there are not so many who know this spell and understand the proper way to recite it. Even fewer of them do not require the assistance of a perfectly staged performance and a Wizard of Oz behind the curtain to achieve it. He’s one of them. What is more, he has so many different kinds of rapture- some that stand apart from the rest in isolated glory, some that last a few paragraphs of a pause, and some that are just phrases woven into a surprisingly colloquial and conversational surrounding tale. He allows his 18 year old self to be excited about some conjecture that perhaps doesn’t seem very important now, and lends his additional forty years of experience to help out.
His other great power is a wonderful capacity for digression, footnotes and sidenotes. He has the sort of curiousity that seems to always pay off- adding to his ability to make an occasion out of stopping for lunch. If the trees are boring, well, let’s talk about singing to ourselves in Latin and acting out Henry V on Dutch roads instead, if the German countryside’s rustic Medieval charm cannot be further elaborated upon, why don’t we talk about the Danubian school? First of all, I am jealous that he can do this. Second of all, it is always fascinating. He’s just never, ever at a loss. The depth of knowledge he has to draw on (which, the flattering comparisons to Byronesque behavior aside, prove that books were some of his best friends, no matter what other ones he may have acquired) is just astounding. He couldn’t create the atmosphere he does without formidable ingredients to draw on- luckily he works with only the best. Perhaps this is part of it too- he refuses to descend from the height on which he sits, or to consider a trip to the pub to nudge and wink more than the once or twice he is in the mood for that sort of thing. I got such a sense of Fermor from what he told me on the side, the way that he shaped this story. Which Fermor is of course the question. Sometimes it was old man Fermor shaping the bright young Fermor, at times it seemed like a remnant of the young Fermor broke through the careful old gentleman, whether he wanted him to or not- how artless was it? Was he consciously naïve? Was he overly careful? How much was a portrait of the artist as a young man, and how much was the young man in negatives himself? Of course near the end Fermor gives us a taste of the un-retouched voice of his 18 year old self and leaves us to judge. But perhaps that is merely selective, planted evidence as well. Whatever is the case, Fermor is one of the best artists of the Self that I’ve met, and certainly the one who seems to have worked on it the longest and the most thoroughly. We all of us have many selves on display, and without schizophrenia, it isn’t often that our selves get to talk to each other with an audience around.
He makes much of the memories that never were (the landmarks just a few miles out of his way he never knew about, the events he arrived just after or before, the art he did not properly appreciate), which for an narrative about 1930s Europe seems an appropriate topic. It’s almost as if he had such an obligation to make what memories he could burn brightly- because he had been to a nearly fallen Eden that no one could go again. If his constant allusions to fairy tales, the Middle Ages, ancient myth and artwork irritate you somewhat or seem problematically racist/essentialist I would just say that Europe was robbed of a lot of Stories that no one wanted in the 20th century in favor of an attempt to return to Before. In the absence of history, the brightly painted knights and the Vermeer serving girls were what was left that one could talk about in order to attempt to understand why. Imperfect memory robs you, voluntarily or involuntarily.:
“Apart from that glimpse of tramlines and slush, the mists of the Nibelungenlied might have risen from the Rhine bed and enveloped the town; and not only Mainz; the same vapours of oblivion have coiled upstream, enveloping Oppenheim, Worms and Mannheim on their way. I spent a night in each of them and only a few scattered fragments remain:… Lamplight shines through shields of crimson glass patterned with gold crescents and outlined in lead; but the arch that framed them is gone. And there are lost faces: a chimney sweep, a walrus moustache, a girl’s long fair hair under a tam o’shanter. It is like reconstructing a brontosaur from half an eye socket and a basket full of bones.”
I mean, this is a travel book. It is firmly and gorgeously grounded in a sense of place. It is, in the end, about walking across Europe and having wacky adventures and picturesque scenes. But it is also about experimenting with literary forms, with the past and with the Self. It is about engaging with a history that was not yet ready to be history, telling friends about wacky adventures, about the power of stories and it is about an 18 year old boy growing up. There’s a gleeful silliness that lurks under some of this, a deadly seriousness to other parts, a winking acknowledgement of melodrama, and a creation of it in successive paragraphs, without breaking a certain kind of consistency. It is a meditation on the role of the storyteller himself. How much of the storyteller is in the story, how much should be there? What would be there anyway, without him, and what needs him to make it real. Some storytellers outshine the story- Fermor is one of these. But I don’t resent him for it. There are a lot of good stories in this book, but in the end, he’s the best one.
Fermor is one of these people. I mean, he tries his best to minimize the reality of it, but he walked across the north of Europe in the depression ridden 1930s in the depths of a horrible winter, where snow covered the otherwise picturesque scenery and where Hitler was in charge. He slept in barns covered in ice, had his belongings stolen, had to go door to door peddling his sketching hobby in order to feed himself, and again, need I say it, NAZIS. This trip could have been a nightmare, or he could have sketched it as one. Who would question that in a narrative written about Europe of 1933, with the clouds closing in? But instead of touting himself as a prophet or a self-important chronicler of the troubles of the interwar years, Fermor makes himself a magician. He is the Guide, the Gandalf, the ghosts of Christmas Past, the curator, the Brothers Grimm, the wise child who knows the way through the woods. There is darkness, but it is the kind of darkness that the story needs, a supportive depth that allows us to appreciate the worth of our Guide.
Fermor has two gifts that allow him to do this. One is a breathtaking capacity for rapture. I can think of no other word for it. He is able to section off a moment and a place and rope it away from the world and declare it Divine. Guy Gavriel Kay, the great Catholic authors and mystics down the centuries, Woolf in her own way, a few others- there are not so many who know this spell and understand the proper way to recite it. Even fewer of them do not require the assistance of a perfectly staged performance and a Wizard of Oz behind the curtain to achieve it. He’s one of them. What is more, he has so many different kinds of rapture- some that stand apart from the rest in isolated glory, some that last a few paragraphs of a pause, and some that are just phrases woven into a surprisingly colloquial and conversational surrounding tale. He allows his 18 year old self to be excited about some conjecture that perhaps doesn’t seem very important now, and lends his additional forty years of experience to help out.
His other great power is a wonderful capacity for digression, footnotes and sidenotes. He has the sort of curiousity that seems to always pay off- adding to his ability to make an occasion out of stopping for lunch. If the trees are boring, well, let’s talk about singing to ourselves in Latin and acting out Henry V on Dutch roads instead, if the German countryside’s rustic Medieval charm cannot be further elaborated upon, why don’t we talk about the Danubian school? First of all, I am jealous that he can do this. Second of all, it is always fascinating. He’s just never, ever at a loss. The depth of knowledge he has to draw on (which, the flattering comparisons to Byronesque behavior aside, prove that books were some of his best friends, no matter what other ones he may have acquired) is just astounding. He couldn’t create the atmosphere he does without formidable ingredients to draw on- luckily he works with only the best. Perhaps this is part of it too- he refuses to descend from the height on which he sits, or to consider a trip to the pub to nudge and wink more than the once or twice he is in the mood for that sort of thing. I got such a sense of Fermor from what he told me on the side, the way that he shaped this story. Which Fermor is of course the question. Sometimes it was old man Fermor shaping the bright young Fermor, at times it seemed like a remnant of the young Fermor broke through the careful old gentleman, whether he wanted him to or not- how artless was it? Was he consciously naïve? Was he overly careful? How much was a portrait of the artist as a young man, and how much was the young man in negatives himself? Of course near the end Fermor gives us a taste of the un-retouched voice of his 18 year old self and leaves us to judge. But perhaps that is merely selective, planted evidence as well. Whatever is the case, Fermor is one of the best artists of the Self that I’ve met, and certainly the one who seems to have worked on it the longest and the most thoroughly. We all of us have many selves on display, and without schizophrenia, it isn’t often that our selves get to talk to each other with an audience around.
He makes much of the memories that never were (the landmarks just a few miles out of his way he never knew about, the events he arrived just after or before, the art he did not properly appreciate), which for an narrative about 1930s Europe seems an appropriate topic. It’s almost as if he had such an obligation to make what memories he could burn brightly- because he had been to a nearly fallen Eden that no one could go again. If his constant allusions to fairy tales, the Middle Ages, ancient myth and artwork irritate you somewhat or seem problematically racist/essentialist I would just say that Europe was robbed of a lot of Stories that no one wanted in the 20th century in favor of an attempt to return to Before. In the absence of history, the brightly painted knights and the Vermeer serving girls were what was left that one could talk about in order to attempt to understand why. Imperfect memory robs you, voluntarily or involuntarily.:
“Apart from that glimpse of tramlines and slush, the mists of the Nibelungenlied might have risen from the Rhine bed and enveloped the town; and not only Mainz; the same vapours of oblivion have coiled upstream, enveloping Oppenheim, Worms and Mannheim on their way. I spent a night in each of them and only a few scattered fragments remain:… Lamplight shines through shields of crimson glass patterned with gold crescents and outlined in lead; but the arch that framed them is gone. And there are lost faces: a chimney sweep, a walrus moustache, a girl’s long fair hair under a tam o’shanter. It is like reconstructing a brontosaur from half an eye socket and a basket full of bones.”
I mean, this is a travel book. It is firmly and gorgeously grounded in a sense of place. It is, in the end, about walking across Europe and having wacky adventures and picturesque scenes. But it is also about experimenting with literary forms, with the past and with the Self. It is about engaging with a history that was not yet ready to be history, telling friends about wacky adventures, about the power of stories and it is about an 18 year old boy growing up. There’s a gleeful silliness that lurks under some of this, a deadly seriousness to other parts, a winking acknowledgement of melodrama, and a creation of it in successive paragraphs, without breaking a certain kind of consistency. It is a meditation on the role of the storyteller himself. How much of the storyteller is in the story, how much should be there? What would be there anyway, without him, and what needs him to make it real. Some storytellers outshine the story- Fermor is one of these. But I don’t resent him for it. There are a lot of good stories in this book, but in the end, he’s the best one.
October 12, 2021
This is about a European walking tour begun by the author in 1933. He was 18 at the time and his budget was £4 a month, sent poste restant to him along his route. The book’s unusual intellectual depth derives from the fact that he did not write the memoir until much later in life. This first volume, of three, appeared in his 62nd year.
Leigh Fermor’s departure from London takes the form of a lengthy description of his steamer, the Stadthouder, pulling away from Irongate Wharf under Tower Bridge on a rainy night. His literary technique here is to slow the moment down through excess description as if to savor it. This is just the first spate of very rich description that one gets throughout.
He naps in the pilot house and is in snowy Holland in a blink. Here everything reminds him of Dutch painting. On the third or fourth night he sleeps above a blacksmith's shop. Promptly at six he’s awakened by the clanging hammer, the hiss of hot metal in water, the smell of singeing horn as a horse is shoed. Heading for the German border, he comes across a belfry and, almost reflexively, climbs it:
His trek across Germany comes at the very start of the Thousand Year Reich. Hitler has been Chancellor just nine months. The people he meets are wonderful. He picks up two fräuleins in Stuttgart--he was strikingly handsome--who don't let him go for days. The parents happen to be away at the time.
There's a funny evening when one of the girls must attend a party held by a business associate of her father. The German host is a Nazi and a man of high, conspicuous style. His ghastly modern villa is deprecated at length. Leigh Fermor watches as the host hits on each young woman in turn, cornering them in his study, and is rejected by both. This does nothing for his standing among other guests. (He styles himself the young woman's cousin, named Brown.) His host introduces him around as the "English globetrotter," which PLF resents. Most amusing is their departure. To protect the girls' reputation he must tell the host he's staying at a nearby hotel, when of course he's sleeping on their sofa:
Then he's in Bavaria wrestling strapping peasants on beer hall floors for fun, losing his precious notebook, his walking stick, and waking "catatonic" with hangover, or, as it's called in Germany, katzenjammer. The holidays pass and on 11 February 1934 he turns 19.
He undertakes a recapitulation of his reading at the time, much of it Latin and Greek, which left me envious of his failed classical education. Though he was a terrible student — a scrapper and practical joker it seems — he ended up a formidable linguist, who, only a few years later during the war, along with his unit--he was in uniform by then--successfully kidnapped a German general in Crete. This would make him a national war hero, but I rush ahead.
In Austria, as in Germany, he has occasion, between his nights in peasants’ stables and hutches, to find himself lodged amid extraordinary grandeur. He had the foresight to arrange a number of introductions on the continent. In Austria he fetches up at the schloss of K.u.K. Kämmerer u. Rittmeister i.R., Count Gräfin of the late dual monarchy.
We move on to an assessment of the quintessential Austrian schloss. Its myriad details are considered, as well as certain regional variations. The disquisition on German painting (Cranach, Bruegel, Altsdorfer, Dürer, etc.) has the righteous authoritative tone of Robert Hughes. Especially interesting is the author’s point about the lush technique of the Italian Renaissance hardening into a grotesque and visceral style in the north due to the brutal wars of the period. (See C.V. Wedgwood's fine The Thirty Years War which he extols in a note.).
We also get details of the Danube's history, its flora and fauna (including a predacious 15-foot catfish known as the Wels). The author's not infrequent late nights at the various inns along the way are colorful. The one five miles from Ybbs "was made of wood, leather or horn and the chandelier was an interlock of antlers."
The section on the migrations of peoples I found particularly dense. One thing you have to say for PLF, he does not write down to his reader. He assumes you have much the same knowledge or educational grounding as he does, and for those of his generation this was by and large true.
Always hovering is the horror of the Holocaust to come. It's 1934 after all. But it's not until he enters Köbölkut in the marches of Hungary, and finds himself among the roughhewn peasantry in a local church on Maunday Thursday, listening to the Tenebrae, then, in search of a bed for the night, when he finds himself talking to the local Jewish baker, that the weight of the inevitable hits the reader and the effect is is one of deep dread.
I gave the book four stars because the style is very dense and I never quite acclimated to it. I find PLF here at times too humorless and didactic. There's a smell of the lamp, true, but there’s also much that’s wonderful. He's clearly drunk on the history of the Danube basin and he has a gift for making languages interesting on the page even for those who do not speak them. That cannot have been an easy task, but he does it. Particularly interesting was how one almost watches him pick up German, writing about the change of dialects along the way.
There’s so much more I’m not touching on. Bratislava and his friend there, Hans, the banker; the last-minute train trip with Hans to Prague in the snow, a backtrack to the only city on his 2000-plus mile route he does not enter on foot; his discussion the following morning with the Jewish baker's Hasidic heritage; the time he's held at gunpoint on the Austria-Czech border when he's thought to be a smuggler; his contemplative loitering on the bridge between Slovakia and Hungary, the Basilica of Esztergom looming overhead, the Danube rushing below.
But for all it’s verbal richness A Time of Gifts can be at times a bit of a slog. One never careers happily through it. One is always aware of the great erudition, the trumping vocabulary, etc. It is in the end like a cloying, too rich desert. If you’re inclined to indulge, as many will be, (for the book is very highly regarded), so much the better for you.
Leigh Fermor’s departure from London takes the form of a lengthy description of his steamer, the Stadthouder, pulling away from Irongate Wharf under Tower Bridge on a rainy night. His literary technique here is to slow the moment down through excess description as if to savor it. This is just the first spate of very rich description that one gets throughout.
He naps in the pilot house and is in snowy Holland in a blink. Here everything reminds him of Dutch painting. On the third or fourth night he sleeps above a blacksmith's shop. Promptly at six he’s awakened by the clanging hammer, the hiss of hot metal in water, the smell of singeing horn as a horse is shoed. Heading for the German border, he comes across a belfry and, almost reflexively, climbs it:
The whole kingdom was revealed. The two great rivers loitered across [the landscape] with their scattering of ships and their barge processions and their tributaries. There were the polders and the dykes and the long willow-bordered canals, the heath and arable and pasture dotted with stationary and expectant cattle, windmills and farms and answering belfries, bare rookeries with their wheeling specks just within earshot and a castle or two, half-concealed among a ruffle of woods. (p.34)
His trek across Germany comes at the very start of the Thousand Year Reich. Hitler has been Chancellor just nine months. The people he meets are wonderful. He picks up two fräuleins in Stuttgart--he was strikingly handsome--who don't let him go for days. The parents happen to be away at the time.
There's a funny evening when one of the girls must attend a party held by a business associate of her father. The German host is a Nazi and a man of high, conspicuous style. His ghastly modern villa is deprecated at length. Leigh Fermor watches as the host hits on each young woman in turn, cornering them in his study, and is rejected by both. This does nothing for his standing among other guests. (He styles himself the young woman's cousin, named Brown.) His host introduces him around as the "English globetrotter," which PLF resents. Most amusing is their departure. To protect the girls' reputation he must tell the host he's staying at a nearby hotel, when of course he's sleeping on their sofa:
We had to take care about conversation because of the chauffeur. A few minutes later, he was opening the door of the car with a flourish of his cockaded cap before the door of the hotel and after fake farewells, I strolled about the hall of the Graf Zeppelin for a last puff on the ogre [his host's] cigar. When the coast was clear I hared through the streets and into the lift and up to the flat. They were waiting with the door open and we burst into a dance. (p. 80)
Then he's in Bavaria wrestling strapping peasants on beer hall floors for fun, losing his precious notebook, his walking stick, and waking "catatonic" with hangover, or, as it's called in Germany, katzenjammer. The holidays pass and on 11 February 1934 he turns 19.
He undertakes a recapitulation of his reading at the time, much of it Latin and Greek, which left me envious of his failed classical education. Though he was a terrible student — a scrapper and practical joker it seems — he ended up a formidable linguist, who, only a few years later during the war, along with his unit--he was in uniform by then--successfully kidnapped a German general in Crete. This would make him a national war hero, but I rush ahead.
In Austria, as in Germany, he has occasion, between his nights in peasants’ stables and hutches, to find himself lodged amid extraordinary grandeur. He had the foresight to arrange a number of introductions on the continent. In Austria he fetches up at the schloss of K.u.K. Kämmerer u. Rittmeister i.R., Count Gräfin of the late dual monarchy.
The count was old and frail. He resembled, a little, Max Beerbohm in later life, with a touch of Franz Joseph minus the white side-whiskers. I admired his attire, the soft buckskin knee-breeches and gleaming brogues and a gray and green loden jacket with horn buttons and green lapels. These were accompanied out-of-doors by the green felt hat with its curling blackcock's tail-feather which I had seen among a score of walking sticks in the hall. (p. 137)
We move on to an assessment of the quintessential Austrian schloss. Its myriad details are considered, as well as certain regional variations. The disquisition on German painting (Cranach, Bruegel, Altsdorfer, Dürer, etc.) has the righteous authoritative tone of Robert Hughes. Especially interesting is the author’s point about the lush technique of the Italian Renaissance hardening into a grotesque and visceral style in the north due to the brutal wars of the period. (See C.V. Wedgwood's fine The Thirty Years War which he extols in a note.).
We also get details of the Danube's history, its flora and fauna (including a predacious 15-foot catfish known as the Wels). The author's not infrequent late nights at the various inns along the way are colorful. The one five miles from Ybbs "was made of wood, leather or horn and the chandelier was an interlock of antlers."
A tireless accordionist accompanied the singing and through the thickening haze of wine, even the soppiest songs sounded charming: 'Sag beim Abschied leise "Servus,"' 'Adieu, mein kleiner Gardeoffizier,' and 'In einer kleinen Konditorei.' . . . The one I liked most was the Andreas-Hofer-Lied, a moving lament for the great mountain leader of the Tyrolese against Napoleon's armies, executed in Mantua and mourned ever since. (p. 170)
The section on the migrations of peoples I found particularly dense. One thing you have to say for PLF, he does not write down to his reader. He assumes you have much the same knowledge or educational grounding as he does, and for those of his generation this was by and large true.
Always hovering is the horror of the Holocaust to come. It's 1934 after all. But it's not until he enters Köbölkut in the marches of Hungary, and finds himself among the roughhewn peasantry in a local church on Maunday Thursday, listening to the Tenebrae, then, in search of a bed for the night, when he finds himself talking to the local Jewish baker, that the weight of the inevitable hits the reader and the effect is is one of deep dread.
The church had lost its tenebrous mystery. But, by the end of the service a compelling aura of extinction, emptiness and shrouded symbols pervaded the building. It spread through the village and over the surrounding fields. I could feel it even after Köbölkut had fallen below the horizon. The atmosphere of desolation carries far beyond the range of a tolling bell. (p. 299)
I gave the book four stars because the style is very dense and I never quite acclimated to it. I find PLF here at times too humorless and didactic. There's a smell of the lamp, true, but there’s also much that’s wonderful. He's clearly drunk on the history of the Danube basin and he has a gift for making languages interesting on the page even for those who do not speak them. That cannot have been an easy task, but he does it. Particularly interesting was how one almost watches him pick up German, writing about the change of dialects along the way.
There’s so much more I’m not touching on. Bratislava and his friend there, Hans, the banker; the last-minute train trip with Hans to Prague in the snow, a backtrack to the only city on his 2000-plus mile route he does not enter on foot; his discussion the following morning with the Jewish baker's Hasidic heritage; the time he's held at gunpoint on the Austria-Czech border when he's thought to be a smuggler; his contemplative loitering on the bridge between Slovakia and Hungary, the Basilica of Esztergom looming overhead, the Danube rushing below.
But for all it’s verbal richness A Time of Gifts can be at times a bit of a slog. One never careers happily through it. One is always aware of the great erudition, the trumping vocabulary, etc. It is in the end like a cloying, too rich desert. If you’re inclined to indulge, as many will be, (for the book is very highly regarded), so much the better for you.
January 25, 2012
This book will forever hold a special place in my heart because it is the first one my son, Jameson Michael Floridia (Jem for short), read:
Actually, it was more like this:
Hopefully, some of Fermor's aesthetically magnificent, dazzling images will dance like sugar plums in his little head. Maybe one day he will be a Wandering Scholar...
Hopefully, Konrad's words will reside latent in his subconscious: "'You see, dear young, how boldness is always prospering?'" (205).
Hopefully (but not likely), I will be able to restrain my new-fatherhood joy and not include him in every subsequent review...but one more for the road:
"He saw himself as a Wandering Scholar. He was alone, and he was ready to sleep anywhere, talk to anybody, live on almost nothing, eat or drink anything, have a go at any language, make friends with rich or poor, and brave the worst that heat and cold, mishap and blister, officialdom, prejudice and politics could do to him" (intro).
Actually, it was more like this:
Hopefully, some of Fermor's aesthetically magnificent, dazzling images will dance like sugar plums in his little head. Maybe one day he will be a Wandering Scholar...
Hopefully, Konrad's words will reside latent in his subconscious: "'You see, dear young, how boldness is always prospering?'" (205).
Hopefully (but not likely), I will be able to restrain my new-fatherhood joy and not include him in every subsequent review...but one more for the road:
"He saw himself as a Wandering Scholar. He was alone, and he was ready to sleep anywhere, talk to anybody, live on almost nothing, eat or drink anything, have a go at any language, make friends with rich or poor, and brave the worst that heat and cold, mishap and blister, officialdom, prejudice and politics could do to him" (intro).
July 17, 2018
This is a remarkable book; the account of an 18 year old who decides to escape England and walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. The year is 1933 and the Nazis have just come to power and he sets off just before winter starts. He had been expelled from school and wanted to write and he took writing materials with him to record his experiences in a journal/diary. Leigh Fermor has the optimism and enthusiasm of youth; but he also had good powers of observation and the ability to make friends easily. That he must have had a great deal of as many people put him up overnight without question. This first of three volumes starts in Holland and moves through Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and ends in Hungary.
The book captures a world about to be torn apart by the rise of Nazism and Leigh Fermor comes across them and they are generally unpleasant; in contrast with most of those he meets. He goes off on tangents on a regular basis to describe something interesting. His descriptions of the natural world are very good, especially the arrival of the storks in the spring in Hungary. Leigh Fermor also has a good eye for architecture and notes the changing nature of the buildings as he travels. He describes the people he meets, the generosity, and often in detail the food (and the drink). Laced through it all is Leigh Fermor’s love of literature and reading. Having had a public school education he has able to quote a great deal of what he had been taught. He records the amused reactions of people as he walked and acted out bits of Shakespeare or read poems and other bits and pieces that he recalled. It is a coming of age tale like no other and he maintained his zest for life until the end. The journalist Allison Pearson recalls when she was sent to Crete to meet him when he was 83 to write an article on him. She expected a frail old man she would have to “look after”. She just about remembers drinking more in 48 hours than she had for the previous 20 years and waking up under a bar. Pearson says that as they walked around Crete she could barely keep up with him and he was very much like he was in the book; observant of nature, breaking into song and poetry periodically and climbing things.
The sheer zest for life is infectious and the descriptions very sharp, for example;
“Snow had covered the landscape with a sparkling layer and the slatey hue of the ice was only becoming visible as the looping arabesques of the skaters laid it bare. Following the white parallelograms the lines of the willows dwindled as insubstantially as trails of vapour. The breeze that impelled those hastening clouds had met no hindrance for a thousand miles and a traveller moving at a footpace along the hog’s back of a dyke above the cloud-shadows and the level champaign was filled with intimations of limitless space..”
This is one of the great travel books.
The book captures a world about to be torn apart by the rise of Nazism and Leigh Fermor comes across them and they are generally unpleasant; in contrast with most of those he meets. He goes off on tangents on a regular basis to describe something interesting. His descriptions of the natural world are very good, especially the arrival of the storks in the spring in Hungary. Leigh Fermor also has a good eye for architecture and notes the changing nature of the buildings as he travels. He describes the people he meets, the generosity, and often in detail the food (and the drink). Laced through it all is Leigh Fermor’s love of literature and reading. Having had a public school education he has able to quote a great deal of what he had been taught. He records the amused reactions of people as he walked and acted out bits of Shakespeare or read poems and other bits and pieces that he recalled. It is a coming of age tale like no other and he maintained his zest for life until the end. The journalist Allison Pearson recalls when she was sent to Crete to meet him when he was 83 to write an article on him. She expected a frail old man she would have to “look after”. She just about remembers drinking more in 48 hours than she had for the previous 20 years and waking up under a bar. Pearson says that as they walked around Crete she could barely keep up with him and he was very much like he was in the book; observant of nature, breaking into song and poetry periodically and climbing things.
The sheer zest for life is infectious and the descriptions very sharp, for example;
“Snow had covered the landscape with a sparkling layer and the slatey hue of the ice was only becoming visible as the looping arabesques of the skaters laid it bare. Following the white parallelograms the lines of the willows dwindled as insubstantially as trails of vapour. The breeze that impelled those hastening clouds had met no hindrance for a thousand miles and a traveller moving at a footpace along the hog’s back of a dyke above the cloud-shadows and the level champaign was filled with intimations of limitless space..”
This is one of the great travel books.
September 7, 2011
Now I fully realize that I have no right to ‘review’ a book of which I’ve read only about forty miserable pages, plus its bloviating introduction. So if you’re a militant Fermor partisan and you’ve arrived here for the purpose of throwing fits and tantrums and tsk-tsking me for bad protocol, then save the exertion of your typing fingers. I’m unmoved by the natural law of book reviewing or its radical adherents. Now where’s my soapbox? This book is the opposite of the kind of books I enjoy. It’s windy, self-satisfied, lifeless, and dry—something you imagine might easily have been written in the pleasureless Age of Hegel. But no. This was actually the 1970s. The era of Three’s Company and Minnie Riperton. So why does this dude sound like he just rode in on a hansom cab from the Congress of Vienna? Seriously. We get it. You’re really, really, really smart and you know a whole bunch of archaic and rarely-used words, and therefore we should feel as if we have somehow failed you if we don’t appreciate your masturbatory wordiness for the poetry it is. But it really isn’t. Poetry, I mean. It’s a gratuitous and bloated travelogue that makes Proust look like Vanna White’s autobiography. Where was the editor here? I’m worried that he scarfed down some hemlock when he got to page ten, never to red pencil a text again. But a lot pretentious American intellectual-aspirants will really eat this stuff up for varied and complex sociological reasons. First of all, it’s painfully British. That’s shorthand in America for classy. You could recast Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with Jeremy Northam, Kiera Knightley, and Alan Rickman, and they’d be falling all over their tins of Earl Grey to get to the cineplex. Secondly, the English major types are often aesthetically conservative. They won’t celebrate DeLillo or Pynchon for another hundred years, until they’ve been fully vetted by history. Besides, who needs experimentation when you’ve got people like Fermor still writing in that old starchy anachronistic style that makes the Anglophiles sink a little deeper into their imported Fair Isle sweaters? Well, actually… you don’t have Fermor anymore. He died earlier this year. And while I’m not happy about anybody’s death, I’m certainly not mournful that he can’t churn out any more books. Forty pages (plus introduction) was more than enough to know that I hated this book with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns. And I want it to be gone, away from me. So if this sounds appealing to you, I’d be happy to send it to you free-of-charge if you’re on my friend list. Along with my pity. (The first friend who asks for it in the public comments below gets it. And after a sales pitch like this, how can you say no?)
June 22, 2017
When I began this book, I fully expected to join the universal chorus of praise. The premise of this book could hardly be more promising: a naïve, bookish nineteen-year-old decides to walk from Holland all the way to Constantinople. We have here all the makings of a literary adventure: an author sensitive enough to language and art to appreciate the finer points of culture, and impetuous enough to get into scraps and misadventures. The only book I can think of that holds comparable promise is Gerald Brenan’s South From Granada, which begins, similarly enough, with the young, bookish Brenan settling down in the south of Spain to read Spinoza.
Well, to get straight to the point, even by the end of the introduction I found myself disappointed. This was surprising. At first I thought I was misinterpreting my own feelings. The book had everything I expected: fine prose, snippets of culture and history, a few youthful misdeeds here and there. Why the persistent feeling of letdown? Is it me? But in the end, true to form, I have decided that my instincts are not misfiring, and that this book is not quite the masterpiece it has been made out to be.
To me, Leigh Fermor is the epitome of superficial learning. No doubt he is well-educated. His vocabulary is vast; he has a solid grasp of art history and a fine appreciation of architecture; he can speak and read several languages; his knowledge of English poetry borders on encyclopedic. And yet all this learning functions, in him, as the feathers in a peacock’s tail: as a bright, beautiful, and at times intimidating display—but a mere display, nonetheless. Leigh Fermor deploys recondite words, the names of painters and poets, and the weighty facts of history, neither to express deep sentiment nor to communicate insights, but as mere ornament.
George Elliot both anticipated and perfectly summed up Leigh Fermor in Middlemarch, in the character of Will Ladislaw—another young Englishman with vague literary and artistic ambitions who travels to the continent to bask in the culture: “rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy ‘bits’ from old pictures, leaving off because they were ‘no good,’ and observing that, after all, self-culture was the principal point.” This description fits Leigh Fermor to a T—the total aimlessness, the nebulous hopes of someday writing a book, the amateurish sketching that Leigh Fermor himself is careful to denigrate.
I admit that I am lobbing these accusations at Leigh Fermor with an uneasy conscience, because in so many ways he is leaps and bounds more learned and eloquent than I am. Yet to misuse one’s gifts seems more culpable than not having gifts in the first place. But let me stop being vague. Consider this passage from the beginning, right when the writer is setting out and saying goodbye to his loved ones:
While I like certain aspects of this sentence—specifically the bit about soggy trouser legs and puddles—the final effect is unpleasant and false. First is the curiously passive construction in the beginning, giving agency to haste rather than people; and the ending focus on cast-iron quatrefoils is emotionally leaden (he isn’t thinking about his family?), and implausible (is this really what the young Leigh Fermor was focusing on in that moment?), and, in sum, strikes me as a purely pedantic inclusion—a word used because he knew it and not because it fit.
This tendency to use words just because he knows them often spoils Leigh Fermor’s prose for me. I grant that his verbal facility is extraordinary. But to what purpose? He is like a virtuoso jazz pianist who shows off his chops in every solo, even on the ballads, without tact or taste. This comes out most clearly in his architectural passages:
Aside from illustrating his penchant for refined obscurity, the bit about the horseman with lances in full armor exemplifies another irksome quality of Leigh Fermor: his romanticism. He seems totally uninterested in actually learning about what he sees. Like Byron, he treats the cathedrals, castles, and local history solely as food for his imagination. The closest thing to a real investigation in these pages is his attempt to explain why, in A Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare speaks of Bohemia, a landlocked country, having a “coast.” This line of questioning is somewhat amusing, sure, but also captures Leigh Fermor’s mentality: there he is, in a foreign land, and the question he occupies himself with is how a dead English playwright made a geographical error—a question of scant literary or historical value, a meaningless curiosity.
His tendency to fetishize learning and his romanticism are, I think, both symptoms of a deeper malady: the habit of looking at only the surface of things. Or, to put this another way, the exclusive preference for the specific at the expense of the general.
To be just, Leigh Fermor is marvelous when it comes to surfaces and particularities. He seems to notice every small, fleeting detail of everything he sees: buildings, cities, people, sunsets, landscapes. His love of strange words and foreign phrases fits equally well with this wont—the verbal flavor of an unusual term more important to him than its ability to communicate meaning. Leigh Fermor’s propensity to drown in an ecstasy of aesthetic observation—rendered in gloriously profuse prose—often reminded me of Walter Pater’s similar flights. But even Pater, an extreme aesthete, is not as wholly superficial as Leigh Fermor—who seems entirely incapable of holding abstract ideas in his mind.
Now, I am being rather unduly harsh towards a book that is generally good-natured and light-hearted. Partly this hostility comes from defensiveness: If I am to accuse someone as highly respected as Leigh Fermor of writing badly, I must make a strong case. As the final exhibit in my prosecution, I include this snippet of a description from a bar in Munich:
To my ears, this is just painfully overwritten. Including infinity and blue strata and iron dumb-bells in a simple bar scene is too much. And the final touch of calling a glass of beer a “brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth”—besides being a nonsensical image—is yet another example of his adolescent imagination: he can hardly touch anything German without his fantasy flying off into legendary knights and Germanic sagas. There is something to be said for enlivening a regular scene using colorful language; but there is also something to be said for honest description.
Now, despite all this, was I often astounded by Leigh Fermor’s diction and his fluency? Yes I was. Did I enjoy some parts of this travel book? Undeniably I did—particularly the section where he is taken in by the German girls. Do I think Leigh Fermor is insufferable? Often, yes, but he can also be charming and winsomely jejune. But did I learn something about the places he traveled to? I’m honestly not sure I did; and that, more than anything, is why I felt the necessity to write in opposition to the famous travel-writer.
Well, to get straight to the point, even by the end of the introduction I found myself disappointed. This was surprising. At first I thought I was misinterpreting my own feelings. The book had everything I expected: fine prose, snippets of culture and history, a few youthful misdeeds here and there. Why the persistent feeling of letdown? Is it me? But in the end, true to form, I have decided that my instincts are not misfiring, and that this book is not quite the masterpiece it has been made out to be.
To me, Leigh Fermor is the epitome of superficial learning. No doubt he is well-educated. His vocabulary is vast; he has a solid grasp of art history and a fine appreciation of architecture; he can speak and read several languages; his knowledge of English poetry borders on encyclopedic. And yet all this learning functions, in him, as the feathers in a peacock’s tail: as a bright, beautiful, and at times intimidating display—but a mere display, nonetheless. Leigh Fermor deploys recondite words, the names of painters and poets, and the weighty facts of history, neither to express deep sentiment nor to communicate insights, but as mere ornament.
George Elliot both anticipated and perfectly summed up Leigh Fermor in Middlemarch, in the character of Will Ladislaw—another young Englishman with vague literary and artistic ambitions who travels to the continent to bask in the culture: “rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy ‘bits’ from old pictures, leaving off because they were ‘no good,’ and observing that, after all, self-culture was the principal point.” This description fits Leigh Fermor to a T—the total aimlessness, the nebulous hopes of someday writing a book, the amateurish sketching that Leigh Fermor himself is careful to denigrate.
I admit that I am lobbing these accusations at Leigh Fermor with an uneasy conscience, because in so many ways he is leaps and bounds more learned and eloquent than I am. Yet to misuse one’s gifts seems more culpable than not having gifts in the first place. But let me stop being vague. Consider this passage from the beginning, right when the writer is setting out and saying goodbye to his loved ones:
Haste and the weather cut short our farewells and our embraces and I sped down the gangway clutching my rucksack and my stick while the others dashed back to the steps—four sodden trouser-legs and two high heels skipping across the puddles—and up them to the waiting taxi; and half a minute later there they were, high over head on the balustrade of the bridge, craning and waving from the cast-iron quatrefoils.
While I like certain aspects of this sentence—specifically the bit about soggy trouser legs and puddles—the final effect is unpleasant and false. First is the curiously passive construction in the beginning, giving agency to haste rather than people; and the ending focus on cast-iron quatrefoils is emotionally leaden (he isn’t thinking about his family?), and implausible (is this really what the young Leigh Fermor was focusing on in that moment?), and, in sum, strikes me as a purely pedantic inclusion—a word used because he knew it and not because it fit.
This tendency to use words just because he knows them often spoils Leigh Fermor’s prose for me. I grant that his verbal facility is extraordinary. But to what purpose? He is like a virtuoso jazz pianist who shows off his chops in every solo, even on the ballads, without tact or taste. This comes out most clearly in his architectural passages:
The archway at the top of these shallow steps, avoiding the threatened anticlimax of a flattened ogee, deviated in two round-topped lobes on either side with a right-angeled central cleft slashed deep between the cusps. There had been days, I was told, when horsemen on the way to the indoor lists rode in full armour up these steps: lobster-clad riders slipping and clattering as they stooped their ostriche-plumes under a freak doorway, gingerly carrying their lances at the trail to keep their bright paint that spiraled them unchipped. But in King Vladislav’s vast Hall of Homage the ribs of the vaulting had further to travel, higher to soar. Springing close from the floor from reversed and bisected cones, they sailed aloft curving and spreading across the wide arch of the ceiling: parting, crossing, re-joining, and—once again—enclosing those slim subdivided tulips as they climbed.
Aside from illustrating his penchant for refined obscurity, the bit about the horseman with lances in full armor exemplifies another irksome quality of Leigh Fermor: his romanticism. He seems totally uninterested in actually learning about what he sees. Like Byron, he treats the cathedrals, castles, and local history solely as food for his imagination. The closest thing to a real investigation in these pages is his attempt to explain why, in A Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare speaks of Bohemia, a landlocked country, having a “coast.” This line of questioning is somewhat amusing, sure, but also captures Leigh Fermor’s mentality: there he is, in a foreign land, and the question he occupies himself with is how a dead English playwright made a geographical error—a question of scant literary or historical value, a meaningless curiosity.
His tendency to fetishize learning and his romanticism are, I think, both symptoms of a deeper malady: the habit of looking at only the surface of things. Or, to put this another way, the exclusive preference for the specific at the expense of the general.
To be just, Leigh Fermor is marvelous when it comes to surfaces and particularities. He seems to notice every small, fleeting detail of everything he sees: buildings, cities, people, sunsets, landscapes. His love of strange words and foreign phrases fits equally well with this wont—the verbal flavor of an unusual term more important to him than its ability to communicate meaning. Leigh Fermor’s propensity to drown in an ecstasy of aesthetic observation—rendered in gloriously profuse prose—often reminded me of Walter Pater’s similar flights. But even Pater, an extreme aesthete, is not as wholly superficial as Leigh Fermor—who seems entirely incapable of holding abstract ideas in his mind.
Now, I am being rather unduly harsh towards a book that is generally good-natured and light-hearted. Partly this hostility comes from defensiveness: If I am to accuse someone as highly respected as Leigh Fermor of writing badly, I must make a strong case. As the final exhibit in my prosecution, I include this snippet of a description from a bar in Munich:
The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips. It was heavier than a brace of iron dumb-bells, but the blond beer inside was cool and marvelous, a brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth.
To my ears, this is just painfully overwritten. Including infinity and blue strata and iron dumb-bells in a simple bar scene is too much. And the final touch of calling a glass of beer a “brooding, cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth”—besides being a nonsensical image—is yet another example of his adolescent imagination: he can hardly touch anything German without his fantasy flying off into legendary knights and Germanic sagas. There is something to be said for enlivening a regular scene using colorful language; but there is also something to be said for honest description.
Now, despite all this, was I often astounded by Leigh Fermor’s diction and his fluency? Yes I was. Did I enjoy some parts of this travel book? Undeniably I did—particularly the section where he is taken in by the German girls. Do I think Leigh Fermor is insufferable? Often, yes, but he can also be charming and winsomely jejune. But did I learn something about the places he traveled to? I’m honestly not sure I did; and that, more than anything, is why I felt the necessity to write in opposition to the famous travel-writer.
September 15, 2011
To enjoy A Time of Gifts you will only need to possess an interest (even a passing interest) in at least one of these three things: the English language, descriptions of land and city-scapes, and the history of European art and culture. Is that more than three things? Possibly. This is certainly the most erudite travel book I have ever read. It is composed of countless magnificent words. I understand this is the case with many books. But this one is a really vivid fabric, each word representing a micro-filament that commands its due attention from the gaze as it passes over the length and folds of this textile work. Each little strand supports its successor and predecessor, and each one shines on its own in the field. I would like for someone (not myself) to attempt an individual word count for this book. The language is almost overflowing its capacity. I learned a great deal just looking up the architectural or religious words and phrasings I did not know; I was mystified by the place-names once he dropped from the Rhine and picked up his pace along the Danube and into the Slavic countries. Fermor's love of and aptitude for languages is one of the pleasures of this work. As he crosses each frontier a new dialect, odd stresses on syllables and deviant pronunciations fascinate him and he will go on extrapolating theories as to their origin and historic context. It's the same when he reads the land, his eye is always looking for connections. His verbose landscape paintings are head-rushes, dizzying flights of prose composed of minute observations of the details of meadows, sunrises and sunsets, snow-dappled limbs, light on frozen rivers, buds emerging from wet bows, dark and constellation-domed forests. It's sometimes a bit much and I reread many sections trying to assimilate it all. But Fermor really gets going when he is in his favorite environs; the Schlossen, the abbeys, the castles and monasteries and libraries that punctuate his trip across Middle Europe. An example of his descriptive prolixity (in the abbey at Melk):
...rococo flowers into miraculously imaginative and convincing stage scenery. A brilliant array of skills, which touches everything from the pillars of the colonnade to the twirl of a latch, links the most brittle and transient-seeming details to the most magnificent and enduring spoils of the forests and quarries. A versatile genius sends volley after volley of fantastic afterthoughts through the great Vitruvian and Palladian structures. Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus. Light is distributed operatically and skies open in a new change of gravity that has lifted wingless saints and evangelists on journeys of aspiration towards three-dimensional sunbursts and left them levitated there, floating among cornices and spandrels and acanthus leaves and architectural ribands crinkled still with pleats from lying long folded in bandboxes...
It goes on. With A Time of Gifts, Fermor has kind of entered my pantheon of personal heroes. Why? I'll tell ya. Of course his capacious intellect, his effortless recitation of obscure and fascinating points in Middle European history connected to his travels (his obsession with the Thirty Years War colors this travelogue in a similar way that Rilke's Brigge Notebooks are colored by his obsession with the deaths of French kings), his open-mindedness and ability to communicate and find commonality with practically anyone, despite barriers of language and culture; all these things, yes, but also because the guy had balls. Balls and intellect (the keys to success). At age 18, finding himself kicked out of school and wanting to become a writer, he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, following two of Europe's most significant rivers. He was met with kindness and generosity, even crossing Hitler's Germany, and there is a gray tint that falls over some of this book when he reflects that within a decade certain quarters he had haunted would be bombed into nonexistence. I suppose that is what this book is, the experiences of a young man instilled with a good dose of that youthful confidence that persuades one that anything is possible, who sets out across a European continent he obviously adores to set it down in a loving portrait, one last time, before it all went to pieces.
...rococo flowers into miraculously imaginative and convincing stage scenery. A brilliant array of skills, which touches everything from the pillars of the colonnade to the twirl of a latch, links the most brittle and transient-seeming details to the most magnificent and enduring spoils of the forests and quarries. A versatile genius sends volley after volley of fantastic afterthoughts through the great Vitruvian and Palladian structures. Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus. Light is distributed operatically and skies open in a new change of gravity that has lifted wingless saints and evangelists on journeys of aspiration towards three-dimensional sunbursts and left them levitated there, floating among cornices and spandrels and acanthus leaves and architectural ribands crinkled still with pleats from lying long folded in bandboxes...
It goes on. With A Time of Gifts, Fermor has kind of entered my pantheon of personal heroes. Why? I'll tell ya. Of course his capacious intellect, his effortless recitation of obscure and fascinating points in Middle European history connected to his travels (his obsession with the Thirty Years War colors this travelogue in a similar way that Rilke's Brigge Notebooks are colored by his obsession with the deaths of French kings), his open-mindedness and ability to communicate and find commonality with practically anyone, despite barriers of language and culture; all these things, yes, but also because the guy had balls. Balls and intellect (the keys to success). At age 18, finding himself kicked out of school and wanting to become a writer, he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, following two of Europe's most significant rivers. He was met with kindness and generosity, even crossing Hitler's Germany, and there is a gray tint that falls over some of this book when he reflects that within a decade certain quarters he had haunted would be bombed into nonexistence. I suppose that is what this book is, the experiences of a young man instilled with a good dose of that youthful confidence that persuades one that anything is possible, who sets out across a European continent he obviously adores to set it down in a loving portrait, one last time, before it all went to pieces.
March 2, 2021
A wonderful travel book if you love: 1) precocious 19-year-old English writers walking in winter through Europe (Holland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia), 2) art, 3) art history, 4) architecture, 5) sociology, 6) language, 7) flowery language, 8) European history, 9) the interwar period in Europe, 10) literature.
I just feel lucky this is part 1 of 3. Two more books to go to Constantinople. So excited.
I just feel lucky this is part 1 of 3. Two more books to go to Constantinople. So excited.
May 7, 2021
A Time of Gifts is a lovely book that may be described as a memoir, a travel book, a biography, or a European history book by Patrick Leigh Fermor. It was not published until 1977 when he was sixty-two years old even though the travels and the diary of the events was written in the 1930s during the rise of Adolf Hitler when Fermor was only eighteen-years old. This young man was determined to drop out of school and travel. I thought that one of the most beautiful parts of this book was the final blessing by his mother in writing the translation of a short poem by Petronius on the flyleaf of the Loeb Horace, Vol. I, as follows:
So in 1933 as Adolf Hitler is beginning to rise to power, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on foot with only a rucksack, a passport and a few favorite books, to explore Europe beginning in Holland with his ultimate destination being Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the first in this trilogy that defies categorization taking young Fermor from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This particular book ends as he enters Hungary.. His experiences are both personal and regional as we find ourselves immersed in his travels. One of our favorite trips to Europe was a river cruise on the Danube River and this book was so reminiscent of all of those beautiful cities that we were able to visit along the way, including Bratislava, Prague and Vienna.
"Wandering along the river's bank just before sunset, I felt I would like to settle and write here for ages. Mediating, admonishing and blessing, a team of sainted and weather-fretted Abbots postured with operatic benignity along the Canons' balustrade. Their halos were dripping with icicles; snow had filled the clefs of their mitres and furred the curls of their pastoral staves."
I must thank my friend, Julie. She recommended that I read Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates. That is next on my list, but Julie you had to know that I would have to read the entire trilogy. Thank you my friend, it is delightful.
"Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores. . . . Yield not to misfortune: the far-off Danube shall know thee, the cold North-wind and the untroubled kingdom of Canopus and the men who gaze upon the new birth of Phoebus or upon his setting. . . "
So in 1933 as Adolf Hitler is beginning to rise to power, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on foot with only a rucksack, a passport and a few favorite books, to explore Europe beginning in Holland with his ultimate destination being Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the first in this trilogy that defies categorization taking young Fermor from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This particular book ends as he enters Hungary.. His experiences are both personal and regional as we find ourselves immersed in his travels. One of our favorite trips to Europe was a river cruise on the Danube River and this book was so reminiscent of all of those beautiful cities that we were able to visit along the way, including Bratislava, Prague and Vienna.
"Wandering along the river's bank just before sunset, I felt I would like to settle and write here for ages. Mediating, admonishing and blessing, a team of sainted and weather-fretted Abbots postured with operatic benignity along the Canons' balustrade. Their halos were dripping with icicles; snow had filled the clefs of their mitres and furred the curls of their pastoral staves."
I must thank my friend, Julie. She recommended that I read Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates. That is next on my list, but Julie you had to know that I would have to read the entire trilogy. Thank you my friend, it is delightful.
September 12, 2016
A true masterwork of travel writing. So much is impressive about this book, starting with Fermor’s journey itself. Over the course of three years, starting when he was just 18, he walked from Holland to Constantinople. I was particularly eager to read this because he passes through a lot of places I went on my train travels this past summer, including Germany, Austria and Bratislava. This first of three volumes covers up until his entry into Hungary.
The sharpness of memory is astonishing, especially when you learn that Fermor lost two of the journals he kept along the way; a late section intersperses a few recovered journal entries with the narrative, and there’s scarcely any difference in terms of detail. His descriptions of the landscape and the people he interacted with are as fresh as if they happened yesterday, and yet he was reconstructing this journey nearly 40 years after the fact.
Although he was in a sense travelling rough – he took very little with him, was often worried about money, and pretended to be a student, an assumed identity that proved to be “an amulet and an Open Sesame” – he also managed to wangle invitations into castles and aristocrats’ homes. For every night he had to sleep in a barn or on a pub floor, there was a stay of comfort or even opulence. This gives him such a broad base of observation that you feel you’re getting a complete picture of European life in the early 1930s. It’s a precious glimpse of pre-war history, but even though he’s looking back Fermor doesn’t use too heavy a hand when recalling the signs of rising Nazism.
Lastly, this is simply damn fine writing. I marked so many gorgeous passages; here are just a few that helped me absorb the atmosphere:
[Bought from £1 from a secondhand bookstore in Henley-on-Thames.]
The sharpness of memory is astonishing, especially when you learn that Fermor lost two of the journals he kept along the way; a late section intersperses a few recovered journal entries with the narrative, and there’s scarcely any difference in terms of detail. His descriptions of the landscape and the people he interacted with are as fresh as if they happened yesterday, and yet he was reconstructing this journey nearly 40 years after the fact.
Although he was in a sense travelling rough – he took very little with him, was often worried about money, and pretended to be a student, an assumed identity that proved to be “an amulet and an Open Sesame” – he also managed to wangle invitations into castles and aristocrats’ homes. For every night he had to sleep in a barn or on a pub floor, there was a stay of comfort or even opulence. This gives him such a broad base of observation that you feel you’re getting a complete picture of European life in the early 1930s. It’s a precious glimpse of pre-war history, but even though he’s looking back Fermor doesn’t use too heavy a hand when recalling the signs of rising Nazism.
Lastly, this is simply damn fine writing. I marked so many gorgeous passages; here are just a few that helped me absorb the atmosphere:
Beer, caraway seed, beeswax, coffee, pine-logs and melting snow combined with the smoke of thick, short cigars in a benign aroma across which every so often the ghost of sauerkraut would float.
The Romanesque nave was packed and an anthem of great choral splendour rose from the gothic choir stalls, while the cauliflowering incense followed the plainsong across the slopes of the sunbeams.
When no buildings were in sight, I was back in the Dark Ages. But the moment a farmhouse or a village impinged, I was in the world of Peter Brueghel.
[Bought from £1 from a secondhand bookstore in Henley-on-Thames.]
Read
October 30, 2016It took me a long time to comprehend history as a palimpsest.
Fermor seems to have understood it viscerally, if not yet intellectually, as a teenager dropping out of school in order to walk from Ostend to Constantinople. He set out in December of 1933, though he didn't write up his experiences until the seventies. He did keep a travel diary (though he lost the first one, when he left his backpack at a youth hostel in Munich for a day, after having met a pair of schoolgirls who took him in) so the book is liminal in so many ways: the observations of a young man interpreted through the experience of himself much older; the fascinating layers of history encountered in villages, cathedrals, castles, and towns across Germany; the shadow of what was to come as Hitler had just taken over within the past year, and had his eye on Austria.
What was incomprehensible back then is gloriously rich to me now--but that's after years of accumulating context, from Huizinga's thoughts on the German Renaissance (and those who disagree with him) to the language itself, to having hitch hiked along the exact section of the Danube, roughly between Melk and Duernstein, which Fermor considers one of the most beautiful river valleys in all of Europe.
I wasn't much older than he when I lived for a year in Austria as a student. And I kept going back to that stretch of the Danube just to see if it was really as amazing as I thought the first time, though hitch hiking was scary. If you were lucky, it was also a way to meet people, something he talks about as he wanders cross country and encounters people who take him in, give him a place to sleep and share their food, from counts in castles to the poorest farm folk.
He also blends his travels with reflections on the layers of history, through the art and architecture, and evokes the old ghosts of cultures smashed by war. It's a brilliant book, elegantly written: it repays regular rereads.
I followed his steps on a map of Europe dated 1815. Most of the villages and towns are on it.
Fermor seems to have understood it viscerally, if not yet intellectually, as a teenager dropping out of school in order to walk from Ostend to Constantinople. He set out in December of 1933, though he didn't write up his experiences until the seventies. He did keep a travel diary (though he lost the first one, when he left his backpack at a youth hostel in Munich for a day, after having met a pair of schoolgirls who took him in) so the book is liminal in so many ways: the observations of a young man interpreted through the experience of himself much older; the fascinating layers of history encountered in villages, cathedrals, castles, and towns across Germany; the shadow of what was to come as Hitler had just taken over within the past year, and had his eye on Austria.
What was incomprehensible back then is gloriously rich to me now--but that's after years of accumulating context, from Huizinga's thoughts on the German Renaissance (and those who disagree with him) to the language itself, to having hitch hiked along the exact section of the Danube, roughly between Melk and Duernstein, which Fermor considers one of the most beautiful river valleys in all of Europe.
I wasn't much older than he when I lived for a year in Austria as a student. And I kept going back to that stretch of the Danube just to see if it was really as amazing as I thought the first time, though hitch hiking was scary. If you were lucky, it was also a way to meet people, something he talks about as he wanders cross country and encounters people who take him in, give him a place to sleep and share their food, from counts in castles to the poorest farm folk.
He also blends his travels with reflections on the layers of history, through the art and architecture, and evokes the old ghosts of cultures smashed by war. It's a brilliant book, elegantly written: it repays regular rereads.
I followed his steps on a map of Europe dated 1815. Most of the villages and towns are on it.
September 7, 2011
infuriating. the long stretches of five starness (and there are many of 'em) contend with as many instances of passages ground to dust by severe overwriting; as great a command as fermor has over the language, the lush, too often, drops into the masturbatory. and that breezy british omniscience? it just grows tiresome. it's those who are mad and sloppy and damaged who truly excite. i.e. christopher hitchens's (certainly a descendent of fermor) dry, reference-packed, know-everythingness is tempered by rage, combativeness, ugliness. in short, this reader requires his authorial voice... a bit more fucked.
November 16, 2022
A Time of Gifts is a book I’d been meaning to read since about 1999. I can’t remember who recommended it to me, but I do recall it being mentioned in The Common Reader catalog (sadly defunct) along with Ill Met by Moonlight, a book about the incredible (and successful) mission to kidnap the commanding general of German forces in Crete during WW2. That book was written by W. Stanley Moss, Patrick Fermor’s second in command on that operation, and Fermor was said to have been irritated by the book, because it seemed a bit too much like boasting for his taste.
Patrick Leigh Fermor was almost the same age as my father, with similar tastes in literature, so perhaps I feel I know him a little (and by the way, the reason I am not approaching eighty years old with a father who was born during WW1 is that I arrived on the scene when my dad was in his late 40’s). The only book Fermor says he carried with him on his walk across Europe was the Oxford Book of English Verse, a book which Dad always had at hand. Fermor was educated (until he was thrown out of school) in the pre-war tradition of the Western Canon, and his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople was informed by that education almost every step of the way. There is no better advertisement for how a liberal arts education enhances one’s experience of life than Fermor’s commentary on each new city or castle he encountered and how it figured in art or history, and I humbly say that as a graduated engineer with a minor in mathematics. Fermor knew French, but he chose a route that avoided French-speaking areas so that he would be forced to learn at least German (which he did), and other languages as well, though he mastered none as well as German. He later became, famously, a scholar of modern and ancient Greek, but that part of his life is not dealt with in A Time of Gifts.
Aside from being a wonderful, rambling, anecdotal education in European history (at least for me), Fermor’s book is full of happy stories, which glow brighter in the retelling because they are true. Fermor wandered across Europe at a particular time in history when the fallen kingdoms and empires of old Europe were not long in their graves, and members of the aristocracy, still in their 40’s and 50’s, could recount tales of formal dinners with the King of Saxony, or having met the Emperor Franz Josef. Indeed, Fermor’s travels were fortuitously redirected by a meeting with a Count in Germany who took a shine to young Patrick; the Count then wrote letters of introduction for Fermor to all his relatives and aristocratic friends along the route of Patrick’s path to the Bosporus. This resulted in a strange dichotomy, as Fermor said, whereby for every two nights he spent sleeping in a barn or a field, he spent one night in a “schloss”, i.e., “castle” in English, though the term can denote something a good deal less grand in German, such as a well-appointed country home.
Fermor’s travels in Germany in 1933-4 are also interesting because they sometimes foreshadowed the Gotterdammerung to come. He met many educated Germans who could hardly believe that Hitler was really Reichs Chancellor, and who thought that he wouldn’t last. But over and over, he met working-class people who supported Hitler because Hitler seemed to be doing something to stabilize the economy, or simply because he seemed a strong, focused leader. Well, I suppose he was that. But also, the kleptocratic element of National Socialism was illustrated by Fermor’s platonic sojourn with two delightful students in Stuttgart, during which they took him to dinner with them at a “big Nazi’s” home. This Nazi fellow was a creep, but also a successful industrialist, thanks in part to his Nazi connections; the girls wanted Patrick along with them in part because they knew the middle-aged businessman would attempt to get handsy. Later, one of the aristocrats who entertained Fermor in Vienna who was about his age became a good friend; later still, fighting the Wehrmacht in Crete, Fermor learned through captured documents that his friend was a Hauptmann fighting on the opposite side of the line, so Fermor managed to move his unit to the right flank of his division in order not to be in the position of firing on his friend.
Fermor’s reflections on literature and history are guides for me for future reading, and some of his various commentaries have already led me to read (God bless Wikipedia) many great stories of which I was unaware, such as the death of blind King John of Bohemia in battle at Crecy, and the honor done him posthumously by the Prince of Wales (The Black Prince). The level of cultural knowledge to which Fermor’s supremely active mind gave harbor is amazing; the fact that he combined such knowledge with a light-hearted love of life is uplifting. From what I can learn, Fermor was one of those people who was, if not the life of the party, then at least always welcome for his witty conversation and curiosity about everything. And to top it all off, he was fearless.
A final note about this trip of his: from Holland to Hungary, traveling with little or no money, he never found himself in any real danger, and he was treated with incredible hospitality so many times that it was more the norm than something to remark upon. And yet, Fermor looked back at all those helpful inn-keepers and burgomeisters with gratitude, and he never took for granted the kindness of strangers, no matter how commonly it befell him. I have had similar experiences in Germany and France; I remember riding in the back of a truck in Germany in chilly September, and a farmer tossing me a ripe apple with a smile, and a French woman correcting my French, and then giving me free admission to an event, because I had tried to speak her language, or a Forstmeister explaining the growth of beech trees, and then beaming at me because I was truly interested. Fermor knew that one does well to be good and trust in others rather than to fear. Trust is usually returned with interest.
My only quibble with the book is that Fermor loved to talk architecture (what was he not interested in?), and I have little interest in the subject, especially baroque architecture, which is what ones sees a lot of along the Danube. But that’s a minor reservation. As a travelogue, this book has few if any peers in my experience. Highly recommended, and damn it, why did no one tell me thirty years ago that I should travel to Greece, when Fermor was still alive, and buy him a drink and listen to him tell stories?
Patrick Leigh Fermor was almost the same age as my father, with similar tastes in literature, so perhaps I feel I know him a little (and by the way, the reason I am not approaching eighty years old with a father who was born during WW1 is that I arrived on the scene when my dad was in his late 40’s). The only book Fermor says he carried with him on his walk across Europe was the Oxford Book of English Verse, a book which Dad always had at hand. Fermor was educated (until he was thrown out of school) in the pre-war tradition of the Western Canon, and his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople was informed by that education almost every step of the way. There is no better advertisement for how a liberal arts education enhances one’s experience of life than Fermor’s commentary on each new city or castle he encountered and how it figured in art or history, and I humbly say that as a graduated engineer with a minor in mathematics. Fermor knew French, but he chose a route that avoided French-speaking areas so that he would be forced to learn at least German (which he did), and other languages as well, though he mastered none as well as German. He later became, famously, a scholar of modern and ancient Greek, but that part of his life is not dealt with in A Time of Gifts.
Aside from being a wonderful, rambling, anecdotal education in European history (at least for me), Fermor’s book is full of happy stories, which glow brighter in the retelling because they are true. Fermor wandered across Europe at a particular time in history when the fallen kingdoms and empires of old Europe were not long in their graves, and members of the aristocracy, still in their 40’s and 50’s, could recount tales of formal dinners with the King of Saxony, or having met the Emperor Franz Josef. Indeed, Fermor’s travels were fortuitously redirected by a meeting with a Count in Germany who took a shine to young Patrick; the Count then wrote letters of introduction for Fermor to all his relatives and aristocratic friends along the route of Patrick’s path to the Bosporus. This resulted in a strange dichotomy, as Fermor said, whereby for every two nights he spent sleeping in a barn or a field, he spent one night in a “schloss”, i.e., “castle” in English, though the term can denote something a good deal less grand in German, such as a well-appointed country home.
Fermor’s travels in Germany in 1933-4 are also interesting because they sometimes foreshadowed the Gotterdammerung to come. He met many educated Germans who could hardly believe that Hitler was really Reichs Chancellor, and who thought that he wouldn’t last. But over and over, he met working-class people who supported Hitler because Hitler seemed to be doing something to stabilize the economy, or simply because he seemed a strong, focused leader. Well, I suppose he was that. But also, the kleptocratic element of National Socialism was illustrated by Fermor’s platonic sojourn with two delightful students in Stuttgart, during which they took him to dinner with them at a “big Nazi’s” home. This Nazi fellow was a creep, but also a successful industrialist, thanks in part to his Nazi connections; the girls wanted Patrick along with them in part because they knew the middle-aged businessman would attempt to get handsy. Later, one of the aristocrats who entertained Fermor in Vienna who was about his age became a good friend; later still, fighting the Wehrmacht in Crete, Fermor learned through captured documents that his friend was a Hauptmann fighting on the opposite side of the line, so Fermor managed to move his unit to the right flank of his division in order not to be in the position of firing on his friend.
Fermor’s reflections on literature and history are guides for me for future reading, and some of his various commentaries have already led me to read (God bless Wikipedia) many great stories of which I was unaware, such as the death of blind King John of Bohemia in battle at Crecy, and the honor done him posthumously by the Prince of Wales (The Black Prince). The level of cultural knowledge to which Fermor’s supremely active mind gave harbor is amazing; the fact that he combined such knowledge with a light-hearted love of life is uplifting. From what I can learn, Fermor was one of those people who was, if not the life of the party, then at least always welcome for his witty conversation and curiosity about everything. And to top it all off, he was fearless.
A final note about this trip of his: from Holland to Hungary, traveling with little or no money, he never found himself in any real danger, and he was treated with incredible hospitality so many times that it was more the norm than something to remark upon. And yet, Fermor looked back at all those helpful inn-keepers and burgomeisters with gratitude, and he never took for granted the kindness of strangers, no matter how commonly it befell him. I have had similar experiences in Germany and France; I remember riding in the back of a truck in Germany in chilly September, and a farmer tossing me a ripe apple with a smile, and a French woman correcting my French, and then giving me free admission to an event, because I had tried to speak her language, or a Forstmeister explaining the growth of beech trees, and then beaming at me because I was truly interested. Fermor knew that one does well to be good and trust in others rather than to fear. Trust is usually returned with interest.
My only quibble with the book is that Fermor loved to talk architecture (what was he not interested in?), and I have little interest in the subject, especially baroque architecture, which is what ones sees a lot of along the Danube. But that’s a minor reservation. As a travelogue, this book has few if any peers in my experience. Highly recommended, and damn it, why did no one tell me thirty years ago that I should travel to Greece, when Fermor was still alive, and buy him a drink and listen to him tell stories?
August 15, 2011
"All horsepower corrupts."
This from "The Walking Man," as good a sobriquet for Patrick Leigh Fermor as you'd want. A TIME OF GIFTS is the sweet story of an 18-year-old Englishman (boy?) who decided to walk to Constantinople. Yeah, yeah. There's that problem of the English Channel and all, but you can't take it so literally. He takes trains, no planes, and automobiles when necessary, but mostly he foots it, and, for a traveler, there's no better way to find local color.
What about his finger-wagging parents, you ask? Off to India, helping keep order in the colony so the sun never sets and all that. It wasn't unusual, back then, for parents to abandon their children to relatives for such patriotic tasks. And Paddy (as he's called by friends... he only died this past June at age 96, God bless him) does write the bad news to Daddy along the way.
At the time of his departure (1933), the Nazis have just come into power in Germany and Fermor walks through that fair country, giving us the odd juxtaposition of ideologues and Black Forest stereotypes, fanatics and Old Country Romantics. I'll take the latter, thank you, and that's where Fermor focuses his attention, too, with the intricate wood carvings, the beer steins, the pipes, the Schnapps, and the Guten Tags! The bucolic nature of it all was reminiscent of some of Knut Hamsun's stuff or certain Hemingway short stories set in the Alps circa 1920s. Nice, in other words.
The nyrb edition is one smart-looking text sporting my favorite painter (Brueghel the Elder) on the cover. That's a plus. On the minus front is the lack of a map showing our pilgrim's progress as he hikes his way through the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, and, at the end, a bridge over trouble waters to Hungary. At 18 (he turns 19 during his travels), Fermor finds that his youth, his good looks, and his status as "student" (though in truth he was a rebellious one who failed to play the game very well) are the perfect ticket to accommodations -- even if it's in a barn -- and a meal in a Europe where the tradition of hospitality still holds weight. Being from England doesn't hurt, either, even in Germany, even after WWI, where only one person takes him to task bitterly for hailing from that "green and pleasant land."
As for travel book credentials, if you've never read Fermor, prepare for great descriptions of nature, sometimes overdone renditions of architecture in cities, and not a few character sketches that are as sharp as those drawings he did in his sketchbook for money at one point. Like all travel literature, it's episodic, and you will find your attention spiking in episodes you favor. I, for instance, loved the scene where he jumped in the back of a loaded truck next to a farm girl who was traveling with a duck and a clutch of eggs which she presented to him for his February 11th birthday. And a scene where he spends time with an old-school nobleman named Baron Pips, who speaks to the wonders of Proust and other great writers. Fermor's ticket to such stays are people who write ahead to friends, alerting them that a young man needing lodging and food is coming through. If you're wondering, I mean. That's why the book runs the gamut from sleeping in the hay to sleeping in fine beds in houses that might as well be called manors.
Published in 1977, A TIME OF GIFTS showcases its well-read author's well-read vocabulary (really, if you know every word he throws around, you're a better reader than I am) and his general ease with literature and the word. Even at 18, Fermor had an incredible background in poetry and literature, huge swaths of it memorized even. It will put you to shame (or in awe, maybe). Still, there's something to be said about a learned vagabond, something akin, maybe, to the Noble Savage that so intrigued Rousseau. And old-school, capital-R Romantic myself, I found this aspect of the book most appealing of all. And, in one of his many asides, Fermor alludes to it when telling the story of how he would later play a role in capturing a Nazi officer in Crete. Fermor apparently quoted memorized poetry that the captured soldier also had committed to memory. Hell with the Stockholm Syndrome, an instant bond was created between captor and captive by literature.
If nothing else, this book showcases the difference between reading sensibilities now and then. In the hands of a 21st-century scribe, a book such as this would probably (per instructions of the publisher) focus on such tawdry elements as how the knight errant strung together all manner of romantic conquests and dodged every kind of creep and pervert that could possibly lurk in Europe. You know. Sex sells and memoirs and travelogues are best peppered with dysfunction, somehow appealing to modern readers weaned in a world of shrinks and psycho-babble. In Fermor's steadier hands, however, there's only one allusion to "those kinds of girls" and he politely declines, thank you. Drinking? Yes. Hangovers even. But again, it's a sweet kind of drinking -- innocent, almost, like you'd get in a painting of peasants taking a break from mowing to sip some kvas or whatever. Alcohol can be Romantic, too, not just an addiction. It's all in the approach.
Finally, it should be noted that A TIME OF GIFTS is the first of two books, the second being the continuation of Fermor's walk in the woods of Europe (BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER). That book does not get him to Constantinople, either, but Part III was in the works when Fermor died and may, so Kelly tells us, come out with a little help from Fermor's editors and friends. That said, I think this is the type of deep, literary travel writing everyone should sample if they have any interest in the genre. If it's too rich for your blood, keep going. Fermor can't help but entertain you if you stick with him. You just need to be patient like any walking man. Horsepower corrupts with reading, too, you see.
This from "The Walking Man," as good a sobriquet for Patrick Leigh Fermor as you'd want. A TIME OF GIFTS is the sweet story of an 18-year-old Englishman (boy?) who decided to walk to Constantinople. Yeah, yeah. There's that problem of the English Channel and all, but you can't take it so literally. He takes trains, no planes, and automobiles when necessary, but mostly he foots it, and, for a traveler, there's no better way to find local color.
What about his finger-wagging parents, you ask? Off to India, helping keep order in the colony so the sun never sets and all that. It wasn't unusual, back then, for parents to abandon their children to relatives for such patriotic tasks. And Paddy (as he's called by friends... he only died this past June at age 96, God bless him) does write the bad news to Daddy along the way.
At the time of his departure (1933), the Nazis have just come into power in Germany and Fermor walks through that fair country, giving us the odd juxtaposition of ideologues and Black Forest stereotypes, fanatics and Old Country Romantics. I'll take the latter, thank you, and that's where Fermor focuses his attention, too, with the intricate wood carvings, the beer steins, the pipes, the Schnapps, and the Guten Tags! The bucolic nature of it all was reminiscent of some of Knut Hamsun's stuff or certain Hemingway short stories set in the Alps circa 1920s. Nice, in other words.
The nyrb edition is one smart-looking text sporting my favorite painter (Brueghel the Elder) on the cover. That's a plus. On the minus front is the lack of a map showing our pilgrim's progress as he hikes his way through the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, and, at the end, a bridge over trouble waters to Hungary. At 18 (he turns 19 during his travels), Fermor finds that his youth, his good looks, and his status as "student" (though in truth he was a rebellious one who failed to play the game very well) are the perfect ticket to accommodations -- even if it's in a barn -- and a meal in a Europe where the tradition of hospitality still holds weight. Being from England doesn't hurt, either, even in Germany, even after WWI, where only one person takes him to task bitterly for hailing from that "green and pleasant land."
As for travel book credentials, if you've never read Fermor, prepare for great descriptions of nature, sometimes overdone renditions of architecture in cities, and not a few character sketches that are as sharp as those drawings he did in his sketchbook for money at one point. Like all travel literature, it's episodic, and you will find your attention spiking in episodes you favor. I, for instance, loved the scene where he jumped in the back of a loaded truck next to a farm girl who was traveling with a duck and a clutch of eggs which she presented to him for his February 11th birthday. And a scene where he spends time with an old-school nobleman named Baron Pips, who speaks to the wonders of Proust and other great writers. Fermor's ticket to such stays are people who write ahead to friends, alerting them that a young man needing lodging and food is coming through. If you're wondering, I mean. That's why the book runs the gamut from sleeping in the hay to sleeping in fine beds in houses that might as well be called manors.
Published in 1977, A TIME OF GIFTS showcases its well-read author's well-read vocabulary (really, if you know every word he throws around, you're a better reader than I am) and his general ease with literature and the word. Even at 18, Fermor had an incredible background in poetry and literature, huge swaths of it memorized even. It will put you to shame (or in awe, maybe). Still, there's something to be said about a learned vagabond, something akin, maybe, to the Noble Savage that so intrigued Rousseau. And old-school, capital-R Romantic myself, I found this aspect of the book most appealing of all. And, in one of his many asides, Fermor alludes to it when telling the story of how he would later play a role in capturing a Nazi officer in Crete. Fermor apparently quoted memorized poetry that the captured soldier also had committed to memory. Hell with the Stockholm Syndrome, an instant bond was created between captor and captive by literature.
If nothing else, this book showcases the difference between reading sensibilities now and then. In the hands of a 21st-century scribe, a book such as this would probably (per instructions of the publisher) focus on such tawdry elements as how the knight errant strung together all manner of romantic conquests and dodged every kind of creep and pervert that could possibly lurk in Europe. You know. Sex sells and memoirs and travelogues are best peppered with dysfunction, somehow appealing to modern readers weaned in a world of shrinks and psycho-babble. In Fermor's steadier hands, however, there's only one allusion to "those kinds of girls" and he politely declines, thank you. Drinking? Yes. Hangovers even. But again, it's a sweet kind of drinking -- innocent, almost, like you'd get in a painting of peasants taking a break from mowing to sip some kvas or whatever. Alcohol can be Romantic, too, not just an addiction. It's all in the approach.
Finally, it should be noted that A TIME OF GIFTS is the first of two books, the second being the continuation of Fermor's walk in the woods of Europe (BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER). That book does not get him to Constantinople, either, but Part III was in the works when Fermor died and may, so Kelly tells us, come out with a little help from Fermor's editors and friends. That said, I think this is the type of deep, literary travel writing everyone should sample if they have any interest in the genre. If it's too rich for your blood, keep going. Fermor can't help but entertain you if you stick with him. You just need to be patient like any walking man. Horsepower corrupts with reading, too, you see.
June 3, 2010
Ah, these English travellers and their amazing prose--prose equal, fitted to their feats. Virginia Woolf on Hakluyt's Early Voyages:
During 1933-35, the eighteen year old Patrick Leigh Fermor, recently expelled from school after an innocent, unconsummated townie flirtation, walked, barge-floated, rode horseback, hitckhiked (lorries, Bugattis, woodcutter sledges), but mostly walked from Rotterdam to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts (1977) gets Leigh Fermor as far as the verge of Hungary, and his lumber room is packed with the loot of Central Europe.
There's his passport, "crammed with the visas of vanished kingdoms." And a peasant table, with "raw knuckles of enormous hands" amid "the cut onions and the chipped pitchers and a brown loaf broken open." Heavy steins, a chandelier of interlocked antlers, a cask of Rhine wine. Horace and Hölderlin in scholar gypsy-size, pocket portable editions plucked from baronal libraries and bestowed in parting on the hobnail-booted, putteed, greatcoated Leigh Fermor as he prepared to step off into the snows once more. An Augusburg choir stall, specimen of Germany's blunt realism in woodcarving, showing "highly polished free-standing scenes of Biblical bloodshed,"
Leigh Fermor is really into the Thirty Years War, so the curio emporium must include a composite warlord portrait:
And to stand for the strange political ruin of the lands in which Fermor wandered, there's the symbolic gold key once worn on the uniform of a Hapsburg court chamberlain--
With one book, Leigh Fermor makes an easy leap into my "favorites." A Time of Gifts is magical, Pale Fire-, Speak, Memory-magical, richly responsive to nature, art, people and history, and with a style so perfectly evocative that you think of sorcery. On to its sequel, Between The Woods and The Water! He's on a borrowed horse, cantering across the great Hungarian plain, thinking of the Magyar and other migrations.
These magnificent volumes are not often, perhaps, read through. Part of their charm consists in the fact that Hakluyt is not so much a book as a great bundle of commodities loosely tied together, an emporium, a lumber room strewn with ancient sacks, obsolete nautical instruments, huge bales of wool, and little bags of rubies and emeralds. One is for ever untying this packet here, sampling that heap over there, wiping the dust off some vast map of the world, and sitting down in semi-darkness to snuff the strange smells of silks and leathers and ambergris, while outside tumble the huge waves of the uncharted Elizabethan sea.
During 1933-35, the eighteen year old Patrick Leigh Fermor, recently expelled from school after an innocent, unconsummated townie flirtation, walked, barge-floated, rode horseback, hitckhiked (lorries, Bugattis, woodcutter sledges), but mostly walked from Rotterdam to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts (1977) gets Leigh Fermor as far as the verge of Hungary, and his lumber room is packed with the loot of Central Europe.
There's his passport, "crammed with the visas of vanished kingdoms." And a peasant table, with "raw knuckles of enormous hands" amid "the cut onions and the chipped pitchers and a brown loaf broken open." Heavy steins, a chandelier of interlocked antlers, a cask of Rhine wine. Horace and Hölderlin in scholar gypsy-size, pocket portable editions plucked from baronal libraries and bestowed in parting on the hobnail-booted, putteed, greatcoated Leigh Fermor as he prepared to step off into the snows once more. An Augusburg choir stall, specimen of Germany's blunt realism in woodcarving, showing "highly polished free-standing scenes of Biblical bloodshed,"
On the first Jael, with hanging sleeves and hatted like a margravine, gripped a coal hammer and steadied an iron spike among the sleeping Sisera's curls.
Leigh Fermor is really into the Thirty Years War, so the curio emporium must include a composite warlord portrait:
The polyglot captains of the multi-lingual hosts hold our gaze nilly-willy with their grave eyes and Valesquez moustaches and populate half the picture galleries of Europe. Caracoling in full feather against a background of tents and colliding squadrons, how serenely they point their batons; or, magnanimously bare-headed and on foot in a grove of lances, accept surrendered keys, or a sword! Curls flow and lace or starched collars break over the black armour and the gold inlay; they glance from their frames with an aloof and high-souled melenacholy which is both haunting and enigmatic.
And to stand for the strange political ruin of the lands in which Fermor wandered, there's the symbolic gold key once worn on the uniform of a Hapsburg court chamberlain--
But now the Empire and the kingdom had been dismembered and their thrones are empty; no doors opened to the gold keys, the heralds were dispersed, the regiments disbanded and the horses dead long ago.
With one book, Leigh Fermor makes an easy leap into my "favorites." A Time of Gifts is magical, Pale Fire-, Speak, Memory-magical, richly responsive to nature, art, people and history, and with a style so perfectly evocative that you think of sorcery. On to its sequel, Between The Woods and The Water! He's on a borrowed horse, cantering across the great Hungarian plain, thinking of the Magyar and other migrations.
February 3, 2023
I am re-reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's trilogy about his walk across Europe in 1933, because one reading of this fascinating compilation was not enough. There’s so much in it to admire, amass and try to remember (I fail dismally on the last). This is the first book, in which he walks from the Hook of Holland though Germany and Austria, taking a detour into what was then Czechoslovakia. By the end of the volume, mostly by following the Danube, he has reached the Hungarian border, at the bridge to Esztergom, where there are almost magical descriptions – it’s tempting to say more here, but one of the charms of this book is that you are walking alongside this young man (he was only eighteen) and discovering with him lands, cities and peoples encountered in childhood learning but now experienced, so I won’t spoil the journey of discovery. This first book of the travels appeared in 1977, when the author was already well past middle age, yet he is able to recapture the excitement of youth striking out into a world where anything and everything was possible, and each nation found to be possessor of a rich and varied treasure of landscape, history and language. If you have an interest in language and history PLF will amaze and delight you; if you have a European bent he will take you there with him, to lands soon to be altered by war and imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain.
One episode that stuck with me was that, while walking through Germany (in 1933) and being shown kindness and hospitality by German people, he arrives in the university city of Heidelburg, where an elderly woman in an inn greets him with,
“Wer reitet so spät, durch Nacht und Wind?” (the first line of Goethe’s Erlkönig, “Who rides so late through night and wind?”).
He is given the warmest hospitality and care, and wonders “how a German would get on in Oxford if he turned up at The Mitre on a snowy December night.”
Further on, his description of Prague makes me want to return there and see it again with his eyes – and his knowledge of architecture! During my holiday there I gazed vacantly at buildings Patrick Leigh Fermor could read, with an intimate knowledge of their context.
Despite all his education and erudition Patrick Leigh Fermor is self-deprecating and assumes second place in the narrative to the people whom he meets along the way, and with some of whom he forms lasting friendships. These range from learned counts in ancient castles to shepherds and fellow dossers-down. Each is accorded the same attention, and respect.
I found his style very entertaining and there are lots of little snippets of humour that keep the journey rolling along – avec panache, in the words of an earlier adventurer (Cyrano de Bergerac). A panache that was to characterise the author’s later career in the Second World War (see “Ill Met by Moonlight” by W. Stanley Moss). PLF refers to the episode briefly in this book..
Tip: read up on The Thirty Years’ War before, or while, reading this tale! And you might want to revisit Prague . . .
One episode that stuck with me was that, while walking through Germany (in 1933) and being shown kindness and hospitality by German people, he arrives in the university city of Heidelburg, where an elderly woman in an inn greets him with,
“Wer reitet so spät, durch Nacht und Wind?” (the first line of Goethe’s Erlkönig, “Who rides so late through night and wind?”).
He is given the warmest hospitality and care, and wonders “how a German would get on in Oxford if he turned up at The Mitre on a snowy December night.”
Further on, his description of Prague makes me want to return there and see it again with his eyes – and his knowledge of architecture! During my holiday there I gazed vacantly at buildings Patrick Leigh Fermor could read, with an intimate knowledge of their context.
Despite all his education and erudition Patrick Leigh Fermor is self-deprecating and assumes second place in the narrative to the people whom he meets along the way, and with some of whom he forms lasting friendships. These range from learned counts in ancient castles to shepherds and fellow dossers-down. Each is accorded the same attention, and respect.
I found his style very entertaining and there are lots of little snippets of humour that keep the journey rolling along – avec panache, in the words of an earlier adventurer (Cyrano de Bergerac). A panache that was to characterise the author’s later career in the Second World War (see “Ill Met by Moonlight” by W. Stanley Moss). PLF refers to the episode briefly in this book..
Tip: read up on The Thirty Years’ War before, or while, reading this tale! And you might want to revisit Prague . . .
June 10, 2023
This is one of those books I had never heard of until it was mentioned everywhere I looked. With my propensity for travel books it was the perfect read for me. It isn’t a page turner but it is certainly satisfying.
Patrick makes the whole world seem young and innocent.
Patrick makes the whole world seem young and innocent.
December 9, 2011
At the tender age of eighteen, on the cusp of adulthood and having been expelled from his last school, young Patrick Leigh Fermor decided to go on a walkabout through the pre-war Mitteleuropa wonderland, all the way to the distant minarets of Constantinople. These are some of the people and things that he encountered along the way:
1. Goose-stepping Brownshirts and beer-swilling S.S. officers
“The song that kept time to their tread, “Volk, ans Gewehr!” ---often within earshot during the following weeks was succeeded by the truculent beat of the Horst Wessel Lied: once heard, never forgotten…”
2. Village stores stocked to the gills with Nazi paraphernalia
“…swastika armbands, daggers for the Hitler Youth, blouses for Hitler Maidens and brown shirts for grown-up S.A. men; swastika button-holes were arranged in a pattern which read Heil Hitler and an androgynous wax-dummy with a pearly smile was dressed up in the full uniform of a Sturmabteilungsmann.”
But also:
3. Brueghelian winter idylls
“A minute later, it was a faraway speck, and the silent landscape, with its Brueghelish skaters circling as slowly as flies along the canals and the polders, seemed tamer after its passing. Snow had covered the landscape with a sparkling layer and the slatey hue of the ice was only becoming visible as the looping arabesques of the skaters laid it bare. Following the white parallelograms the lines of the willow dwindled as insubstantially as trails of vapour. The breeze that impelled those hastening clouds had met no hindrance for a thousand miles and a traveler moving at a footpace along the hog’s back of a dyke above the cloud-shadows and the level champaign was filled with intimations of limitless space.”
4. Friendly peasants in clogs and lots of cows
“In the barn on the other side, harrows, ploughshares and scythes and sieves loomed for a moment, and beyond, tethered to a manger that ran the length of the barn, horns and tousled brows and liquid eyes gleamed in the lantern’s beams.”
5. Gemutliche gasthauses with kind proprietors
“…for in the end someone woke me and led me upstairs like a sleep-walker and showed me into a bedroom with a low and slanting ceiling and an eiderdown like a giant meringue.”
6. Party-loving, pretty Frauleins
“When I woke up on the sofa---rather late; we had sat up talking and drinking Annie’s father’s wine before going to bed---I had no idea where I was; it was a frequent phenomenon on this journey.”
7. Kooky aristocrats and fascinating pedants with a yen for the glorious days of the Kaiser and the Austro-Hungarian Empire
“The Count was old and frail. He resembled, a little, Max Beerbohm in later life, with a touch of Franz Joseph minus the white side-whiskers.”
8. A Shakespeare quoting, enterprising tramp
””Ah, dear young!” he said, “I am of ripe years already! I would always be frightening them! You, so tender, will always melt hearts.””
9. Balkan Ghettoes full of living Hasidic Jews
”…Talmudic students of about my age…their cheeks were as pale as the wax that lit the page while the dense black lettering swallowed up their youths and their lives.”
10. Grunewald’s horrific crucifixion
“…the special law of gravity, tearing the nail-holes wider, dislocates the fingers and expands them like spider’s legs. Wounds fester, bones break through the flesh and the grey lips, wrinkling concentrically round a tooth-set hole, gape in a cringing spasm of pain. The body, mangled, dishonoured and lynched, twists in rigor mortis.”
And most importantly:
11. Grand architecture --- to wax poetic about in a sensory-overloaded, vertigo-inducing manner.
The painted ceiling at the Melk Abbey
“...rococo flowers into miraculously imaginative and convincing stage scenery. A brilliant array of skills, which touches everything from the pillars of the colonnade to the twirl of a latch, links the most brittle and transient-seeming details to the most magnificent and enduring spoils of the forests and quarries. A versatile genius sends volley after volley of fantastic afterthoughts through the great Vitruvian and Palladian structures. Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus. Light is distributed operatically and skies open in a new change of gravity that has lifted wingless saints and evangelists on journeys of aspiration towards three-dimensional sunbursts and left them levitated there, floating among cornices and spandrels and acanthus leaves and architectural ribands crinkled still with pleats from lying long folded in bandboxes...”
Fermor’s writing is as marvelous as the brooding castles and baroque palaces that he encountered along his journey, but at times so dizzyingly rich and dazzlingly erudite that it is best taken in measured doses at a time. European culture and history is an open book in his hands and what a wonderful and profoundly strange place it is!
Prepares sturdy boots for the remaining trek to Constantinople.
1. Goose-stepping Brownshirts and beer-swilling S.S. officers
“The song that kept time to their tread, “Volk, ans Gewehr!” ---often within earshot during the following weeks was succeeded by the truculent beat of the Horst Wessel Lied: once heard, never forgotten…”
2. Village stores stocked to the gills with Nazi paraphernalia
“…swastika armbands, daggers for the Hitler Youth, blouses for Hitler Maidens and brown shirts for grown-up S.A. men; swastika button-holes were arranged in a pattern which read Heil Hitler and an androgynous wax-dummy with a pearly smile was dressed up in the full uniform of a Sturmabteilungsmann.”
But also:
3. Brueghelian winter idylls
“A minute later, it was a faraway speck, and the silent landscape, with its Brueghelish skaters circling as slowly as flies along the canals and the polders, seemed tamer after its passing. Snow had covered the landscape with a sparkling layer and the slatey hue of the ice was only becoming visible as the looping arabesques of the skaters laid it bare. Following the white parallelograms the lines of the willow dwindled as insubstantially as trails of vapour. The breeze that impelled those hastening clouds had met no hindrance for a thousand miles and a traveler moving at a footpace along the hog’s back of a dyke above the cloud-shadows and the level champaign was filled with intimations of limitless space.”
4. Friendly peasants in clogs and lots of cows
“In the barn on the other side, harrows, ploughshares and scythes and sieves loomed for a moment, and beyond, tethered to a manger that ran the length of the barn, horns and tousled brows and liquid eyes gleamed in the lantern’s beams.”
5. Gemutliche gasthauses with kind proprietors
“…for in the end someone woke me and led me upstairs like a sleep-walker and showed me into a bedroom with a low and slanting ceiling and an eiderdown like a giant meringue.”
6. Party-loving, pretty Frauleins
“When I woke up on the sofa---rather late; we had sat up talking and drinking Annie’s father’s wine before going to bed---I had no idea where I was; it was a frequent phenomenon on this journey.”
7. Kooky aristocrats and fascinating pedants with a yen for the glorious days of the Kaiser and the Austro-Hungarian Empire
“The Count was old and frail. He resembled, a little, Max Beerbohm in later life, with a touch of Franz Joseph minus the white side-whiskers.”
8. A Shakespeare quoting, enterprising tramp
””Ah, dear young!” he said, “I am of ripe years already! I would always be frightening them! You, so tender, will always melt hearts.””
9. Balkan Ghettoes full of living Hasidic Jews
”…Talmudic students of about my age…their cheeks were as pale as the wax that lit the page while the dense black lettering swallowed up their youths and their lives.”
10. Grunewald’s horrific crucifixion
“…the special law of gravity, tearing the nail-holes wider, dislocates the fingers and expands them like spider’s legs. Wounds fester, bones break through the flesh and the grey lips, wrinkling concentrically round a tooth-set hole, gape in a cringing spasm of pain. The body, mangled, dishonoured and lynched, twists in rigor mortis.”
And most importantly:
11. Grand architecture --- to wax poetic about in a sensory-overloaded, vertigo-inducing manner.
The painted ceiling at the Melk Abbey
“...rococo flowers into miraculously imaginative and convincing stage scenery. A brilliant array of skills, which touches everything from the pillars of the colonnade to the twirl of a latch, links the most brittle and transient-seeming details to the most magnificent and enduring spoils of the forests and quarries. A versatile genius sends volley after volley of fantastic afterthoughts through the great Vitruvian and Palladian structures. Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus. Light is distributed operatically and skies open in a new change of gravity that has lifted wingless saints and evangelists on journeys of aspiration towards three-dimensional sunbursts and left them levitated there, floating among cornices and spandrels and acanthus leaves and architectural ribands crinkled still with pleats from lying long folded in bandboxes...”
Fermor’s writing is as marvelous as the brooding castles and baroque palaces that he encountered along his journey, but at times so dizzyingly rich and dazzlingly erudite that it is best taken in measured doses at a time. European culture and history is an open book in his hands and what a wonderful and profoundly strange place it is!
Prepares sturdy boots for the remaining trek to Constantinople.
July 2, 2015
Fermor is considered by many to be one of the great travel writers in our time. I note he waited many years before he wrote of his wanderings. He kept a notebook, several really, and added and embellished what had not occurred to him at nineteen when he was walking to Constantinople. He admits to being a green young thing and, while he had a good education and many gifts, it is his insatiable curiosity and open demeanor that gained him so many friends and helpful companions.
This is what should be required reading in high school. Not college, but high school. We want youth to realize that the world is theirs, but they must first learn to navigate just a little, and prepare to be on their own. One should not have to require the whole book: just the first 120 pages should suffice. By the time Fermor has told of his "hoggish catalepsy" at Munich’s Hofbraushaus, if there is no comprehension in dull minds, there is no need to explain that one must have something to work with before one goes off wandering alone. The ecstatic enthusiasm and excitement of youth is everywhere evident. What it takes to succeed in the world is a great deal, but mostly it is interest in the world. It can be taught. I think.
Fermor indulges and cultivates his interest in architecture on his journey. It would be hard not to be impressed with the gorgeous relics on display throughout Europe. His impression of the "scenes of Biblical bloodshed [run] riot" in the churches made me laugh with recognition. My first visit to Europe produced the same feelings of shock and awe to see in churches the graphic display of Christ’s crucifixion.
Oh, what a moment in time Fermor captures: the brown shirts consolidating their power in Germany and Europe between the wars. He caught a little of that held-breath tension, and reviled himself for ever after for missing the significance of the street fighting in Vienna.
If only Cheryl Strayed in her memoir Wild had taken a leaf from Fermor’s book, her own work would have been substantially improved. But then, her work would have been better also had she followed the very different and equally anguished memoir by Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk which of course did not come out until after Strayed’s memoir. The exceedingly popular Wild did nothing for me but put me in a bloody state of mind while the other two memoirs add something both to my understanding and to my enjoyment of the world.
Rather early on in this book, Fermor makes glancing reference to his time in Crete when he captured a German general and secreted him away in a cave, something for which he would ever be famous. He tells of how they spoke lines of the same poem, first one then the other, realizing that at some distant time "they’d both drunk from the same spring." That capture was immortalized in a 1950s book by Stanley Moss called Ill Met: By Moonlight and a 1957 film starring Dirk Bogarde called Night Ambush.
I adore what Fermor discovers about Shakespeare as he searched for reasons Shakespeare would have placed an Bohemia near the sea in one of his plays:
And this is a small thing, perhaps, but it so illuminates why Fermor was such a great travel writer: he becomes completely enraptured one night standing on a bridge in Prague, looking over the Vltava and tracing in his mind the twists and turns of the river--distances and changes in culture--on its way to the sea. It is Fermor looking at it, thinking about it, and speaking of it that makes the river a marvel of space and time.
This is what should be required reading in high school. Not college, but high school. We want youth to realize that the world is theirs, but they must first learn to navigate just a little, and prepare to be on their own. One should not have to require the whole book: just the first 120 pages should suffice. By the time Fermor has told of his "hoggish catalepsy" at Munich’s Hofbraushaus, if there is no comprehension in dull minds, there is no need to explain that one must have something to work with before one goes off wandering alone. The ecstatic enthusiasm and excitement of youth is everywhere evident. What it takes to succeed in the world is a great deal, but mostly it is interest in the world. It can be taught. I think.
Fermor indulges and cultivates his interest in architecture on his journey. It would be hard not to be impressed with the gorgeous relics on display throughout Europe. His impression of the "scenes of Biblical bloodshed [run] riot" in the churches made me laugh with recognition. My first visit to Europe produced the same feelings of shock and awe to see in churches the graphic display of Christ’s crucifixion.
Oh, what a moment in time Fermor captures: the brown shirts consolidating their power in Germany and Europe between the wars. He caught a little of that held-breath tension, and reviled himself for ever after for missing the significance of the street fighting in Vienna.
"I bitterly regretted this misappraisal later on: like Fabrice in La Chartreuse de Parme, when he was not quite sure whether he had been present at Waterloo."When I was younger, though not young enough perhaps, I remember someone pressing into my hands a copy of the terrific travel story News From Tartary by Peter Fleming. It made me realize that such kind of travel was achievable, even something to strive for.
If only Cheryl Strayed in her memoir Wild had taken a leaf from Fermor’s book, her own work would have been substantially improved. But then, her work would have been better also had she followed the very different and equally anguished memoir by Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk which of course did not come out until after Strayed’s memoir. The exceedingly popular Wild did nothing for me but put me in a bloody state of mind while the other two memoirs add something both to my understanding and to my enjoyment of the world.
Rather early on in this book, Fermor makes glancing reference to his time in Crete when he captured a German general and secreted him away in a cave, something for which he would ever be famous. He tells of how they spoke lines of the same poem, first one then the other, realizing that at some distant time "they’d both drunk from the same spring." That capture was immortalized in a 1950s book by Stanley Moss called Ill Met: By Moonlight and a 1957 film starring Dirk Bogarde called Night Ambush.
I adore what Fermor discovers about Shakespeare as he searched for reasons Shakespeare would have placed an Bohemia near the sea in one of his plays:
"Shakespeare didn’t care a fig for the topography of the comedies. Unless it were some Italian town—Italy being the universal lucky dip for Renaissance playwrights—the spiritual setting was always the same. Woods and parkland on the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire borders, that is; flocks and fairs and a palace or two, a mixture of Cockayne- and Cloud-Cuckoo- and fairyland with stage mountains rather taller than the Cotswolds and full of torrents and caves, haunted by bears and washed, if need be, by an ocean teeming with foundering ships and mermaids."
And this is a small thing, perhaps, but it so illuminates why Fermor was such a great travel writer: he becomes completely enraptured one night standing on a bridge in Prague, looking over the Vltava and tracing in his mind the twists and turns of the river--distances and changes in culture--on its way to the sea. It is Fermor looking at it, thinking about it, and speaking of it that makes the river a marvel of space and time.
May 5, 2020
At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.
The evidence of the "amazing" rating in this instance is that I sat raptured and read all day long.
It wasn't a diversion or an escape from tedium.
No, reading Fermor was enthralling. Most people now know the context where an 18 y/o Fermor in 1933 decides to walk from Holland to Constantinople. So he does. He wrote this trilogy of account over thirty years later and there is a bit of refocusing and jumping outside of the actual experience. That makes a compelling narrative as does his insertion of actual diary entries during his pilgrimage. His mind is filled with poetry, with architecture and painting. he meets interesting people who gloss over thousands of years of history with terse but bold erudition. There isn't a great deal of self doubt here which is possibly a result of mature editing but somehow I think he was simply more purposed. He creates a social event in one singular instance as he fears he is an affront to his potential hosts. he wasn't but isn't able to step back into the situation. he has to proceed with the farce. that is on the instance I encountered and I marvel at that, especially in in reflection of my own life and travel.
I just bought several more volumes of his and am considering sitting by the mailbox in anticipation.
The evidence of the "amazing" rating in this instance is that I sat raptured and read all day long.
It wasn't a diversion or an escape from tedium.
No, reading Fermor was enthralling. Most people now know the context where an 18 y/o Fermor in 1933 decides to walk from Holland to Constantinople. So he does. He wrote this trilogy of account over thirty years later and there is a bit of refocusing and jumping outside of the actual experience. That makes a compelling narrative as does his insertion of actual diary entries during his pilgrimage. His mind is filled with poetry, with architecture and painting. he meets interesting people who gloss over thousands of years of history with terse but bold erudition. There isn't a great deal of self doubt here which is possibly a result of mature editing but somehow I think he was simply more purposed. He creates a social event in one singular instance as he fears he is an affront to his potential hosts. he wasn't but isn't able to step back into the situation. he has to proceed with the farce. that is on the instance I encountered and I marvel at that, especially in in reflection of my own life and travel.
I just bought several more volumes of his and am considering sitting by the mailbox in anticipation.
October 7, 2016
What a marvelous book, and what a charming, brilliant, erudite and unbelievably captivating narrator Patrick Leigh Fermor was! After reading his enchantingly rich travelogue, I feel that I literally lack the words to express my amazement. I don't know whether I admire more his adventurous spirit, his acute ability for observation of persons and places of a now obsolete eras, not to mention his insightful remarks on art, architecture, geography, clothing, music, foods, religions, languages. literature, history, anthropology, ethnography, or his utterly amazing talent to make friends everywhere, or - last, but not least - the boyish enthusiasm and boundless curiosity with which he regards everything on his path.
Reading this book is no mean feat. Although I'm luckier than many of the other readers, having a knack for languages myself, it was still quite a challenge to comprehend Fermor's complex English eloquence and to not become befuddled by his dazingly fanciful narrative digressions, literal and figurative. The author's inexhaustible willingness to be distracted, his susceptibility to detours geographical, intellectual, aesthetic, and occasionally amorous, constitute, if anything, an essential and self-conscious component of the style that has won him such an avid following. For me personally, the main theme in his books, the kindness of strangers, will never seize to touch a sensitive chord, and I will most definitely read more about his adventurous life and travels.
Reading this book is no mean feat. Although I'm luckier than many of the other readers, having a knack for languages myself, it was still quite a challenge to comprehend Fermor's complex English eloquence and to not become befuddled by his dazingly fanciful narrative digressions, literal and figurative. The author's inexhaustible willingness to be distracted, his susceptibility to detours geographical, intellectual, aesthetic, and occasionally amorous, constitute, if anything, an essential and self-conscious component of the style that has won him such an avid following. For me personally, the main theme in his books, the kindness of strangers, will never seize to touch a sensitive chord, and I will most definitely read more about his adventurous life and travels.
May 7, 2012
In November 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor was eighteen years old. His scholastic career having been disrupted by being expelled from school, he was studying privately in the hope of being admitted to Royal Military College Sandhurst when he realised that being a peacetime soldier held no attraction. So, in need of a change of scenery, Leigh Fermor decided to “abandon London and set out across Europe like a tramp”, or as he expressed it to himself, “like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight or the hero of The Cloister and the Hearth”. Within a month, Leigh Fermor had put his idea into action. He left London for Rotterdam and from there travelled – mostly on foot – to Constantinople. This is an account of the first part of that journey, from London to Hungary, during the winter and early spring of 1933 and 1934.
First published in 1977, the book begins with an introductory letter to Xan Fielding, whom Leigh Fermor met when they were both SOE officers organising the resistance in German-occupied Crete during World War II. While together they talked about their lives before the war. The book has its genesis in those discussions with Fielding, and is coloured by Leigh Fermor’s subsequent visits to the places he had visited on his journey as a young man as well as his experiences during the war. The effect of this is to layer the narrative. It’s not just the tale of a precocious and enthusiastic teenager with more romantic notions than may have been good for him, it’s also the story of the man who went on to live a life of adventure in his 20s and of the older man who looks back on that life.
Leigh Fermor slept in barns and in inns, as well as in manor houses and castles. He mixed with labourers, priests, soldiers and aristocrats. He saw and described gothic churches, abbeys, coffee houses, small villages and great cities. In Germany, he witnessed the early days of Hitler’s rule. In Vienna he came to understand the significance of the breaking-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Leigh Fermor's narrative chronicles an adventure in a setting which still exists, but in a society that is long gone.
The book is not a light read. It covers geography, history, politics, literature, linguistics and architecture, sometimes in a broad sweep and sometimes in minute detail. If a detailed description of a ceiling in Melk Abbey sounds unappealing, then this may not be the book for you. Some parts of Leigh Fermor’s journey I found more interesting than others, but overall this was a very worthwhile read.
As I read, I thought that Leigh Fermor may have been the most precocious eighteen year old in history. The three pages he spends detailing all of the poetry he knew well enough to recite aloud while he walked made me roll my eyes. However, the older Leigh Fermor was aware of his deficiencies. At one point he ponders how he may have struck an older, cultured, aristocratic man in whose house he had spent a few days: “precocious, immature, restless, voluble, prone to show off, unreliably bookish perhaps …..”. In truth, Leigh Fermor was probably all of those things, but he was also curious, resilient and adventurous. I’m very glad to have read about the first part of his big adventure. I look forward to reading the second instalment, Between the Woods and the Water, and the third instalment, as yet unnamed, which is apparently to be published in 2013. Although Leigh Fermor died in June 2011, the final instalment is to be complied from a draft and from his diaries.
June 2, 2019
I came to Patrick Fermor via a friendly biography: Patrick Leigh Fermor; An Adventure. So I was a fan looking to find the original. His travel memoir: A Time of Gifts was all I had hoped. It is highly recommended, and appropriate for any reader. His intended audience is the arm chair traveler. One with a tolerance for an educated vocabulary and a variety of languages. I was more likely to look up places than words. Both extra efforts were necessary and rewarding. If you cannot imagine anyone not adhering the concept of all writing at the 6th grade level, do yourself a favor, and skip this book.
A Time for Gifts is the Fermor’s story of himself as a high school dropout walking from Holland into the Balkans. It is part 1 of a three-part sequence that will take him to Constantinople. The narrative begins with in the winter of 1934. It was written about 60 years after he finished. The author is now more aware of what was then just hitting central Europe, Hitler’s Germany. He tell us that at the time, being a callous youth he did not care. But his recollections are not devoid of the gathering darkness and wave of unease and dread that was part of the reality among Germans and their neighbors.
Politics aside, Fermor’s adventure is that of a student, a term he found very useful traveling across heartlands more than capitals; on a very minimal at times cash free budget. By calling himself a student he found, to his surprise he could expect not only the traditional cheap logins in the hostels, but in many places, he could present himself to the local police or town burgomaster and get a free bed and a meal. In fact he would sleep in haybeds and castles based onhis luck, his ability to charm and not infrequent use of letters of introduction. 1934 was a world far more open to strangers and willing to share home and heart than is easy for a 21st century reader to imagine.
His ability to render the warmth and openness of the different kinds of people befriended is alone worth the read. What lifts the book to a rich experience are his many enthusiasms. Drop out he may have been, but he was or became highly educated in the history, art and architecture of the places he takes himself to see. The reader can expect to learn much about the founding houses and legends of Germany, Austria and along the Danube into Hungary. Think Games of Thrones, except actual people, their real castles and the art they knew first hand. Often this part of the narrative can carry the reader by shear force of the writers thrill to be among the roads and rooms and artwork he had only known in books.
Thinking about the variety of travel books I have read. The list seems to grow as I try to catalogue them. Some of the classics, like Polo and Twain, specialty travelers like the desert writers and solo sailors. A Time of Gifts is my favorite. I will be finishing the sequence riding the high of reading this one.
A Time for Gifts is the Fermor’s story of himself as a high school dropout walking from Holland into the Balkans. It is part 1 of a three-part sequence that will take him to Constantinople. The narrative begins with in the winter of 1934. It was written about 60 years after he finished. The author is now more aware of what was then just hitting central Europe, Hitler’s Germany. He tell us that at the time, being a callous youth he did not care. But his recollections are not devoid of the gathering darkness and wave of unease and dread that was part of the reality among Germans and their neighbors.
Politics aside, Fermor’s adventure is that of a student, a term he found very useful traveling across heartlands more than capitals; on a very minimal at times cash free budget. By calling himself a student he found, to his surprise he could expect not only the traditional cheap logins in the hostels, but in many places, he could present himself to the local police or town burgomaster and get a free bed and a meal. In fact he would sleep in haybeds and castles based onhis luck, his ability to charm and not infrequent use of letters of introduction. 1934 was a world far more open to strangers and willing to share home and heart than is easy for a 21st century reader to imagine.
His ability to render the warmth and openness of the different kinds of people befriended is alone worth the read. What lifts the book to a rich experience are his many enthusiasms. Drop out he may have been, but he was or became highly educated in the history, art and architecture of the places he takes himself to see. The reader can expect to learn much about the founding houses and legends of Germany, Austria and along the Danube into Hungary. Think Games of Thrones, except actual people, their real castles and the art they knew first hand. Often this part of the narrative can carry the reader by shear force of the writers thrill to be among the roads and rooms and artwork he had only known in books.
Thinking about the variety of travel books I have read. The list seems to grow as I try to catalogue them. Some of the classics, like Polo and Twain, specialty travelers like the desert writers and solo sailors. A Time of Gifts is my favorite. I will be finishing the sequence riding the high of reading this one.
April 3, 2023
This was good, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would, based on other rave reviews.
Fermor had a privileged but unconventional childhood, and in 1933 at the age of 18, skipped out of an expected career path to walk across Europe to Constantinople. This is his account of the first half of that journey, and what makes it unusual is that Fermor did not write this book until more than 40 years later, and then it was in the form of a letter to an old friend from WW2. References to that period, when he was involved in guerilla warfare for the British army, are woven into his wintertime (yes!) walk across Europe.
As a result I was often unsure whether I was reading the words of Fermor the impetuous and spontaneous youth, or those of the erudite expert on art and history that the mature Fermor became.
There were many times when I said to myself, “oh come on, no young person – even such a brilliant scholar as he was – would ever have said that!” And I was right – very near the end Fermor does quote directly from his notes, and they are as fresh and innocent as you’d expect from an 18-year-old set free in the world.
He wrote his diary almost every day, though several volumes were lost so it is impressive how he managed to re-create those lost episodes years later, but I would still have liked to have read more from them, uninterpreted.
Despite that I’m looking forward to the second part, Between the Woods and the Water
Fermor had a privileged but unconventional childhood, and in 1933 at the age of 18, skipped out of an expected career path to walk across Europe to Constantinople. This is his account of the first half of that journey, and what makes it unusual is that Fermor did not write this book until more than 40 years later, and then it was in the form of a letter to an old friend from WW2. References to that period, when he was involved in guerilla warfare for the British army, are woven into his wintertime (yes!) walk across Europe.
As a result I was often unsure whether I was reading the words of Fermor the impetuous and spontaneous youth, or those of the erudite expert on art and history that the mature Fermor became.
There were many times when I said to myself, “oh come on, no young person – even such a brilliant scholar as he was – would ever have said that!” And I was right – very near the end Fermor does quote directly from his notes, and they are as fresh and innocent as you’d expect from an 18-year-old set free in the world.
He wrote his diary almost every day, though several volumes were lost so it is impressive how he managed to re-create those lost episodes years later, but I would still have liked to have read more from them, uninterpreted.
Despite that I’m looking forward to the second part, Between the Woods and the Water
July 20, 2008
Have you ever so adored a book that you feel that everyone in the world should have the authors name on their lips and you want to buy every copy so you can force everyone you know to sit down and read it right now? But that the same time this book is so special, so truly unique in your life and also the universe, that to read it is sort of like the time in the Wizard of Oz when it all goes from black-and-white to Technicolor and only truly worthy people deserve moments like that so you also want to keep it a secret and never put in the hands of someone else a book that is maybe the fullest expression of what it is to be young and alive and human? That is how I feel about A Time of Gifts.
April 28, 2021
“Increasing height laid bare new reaches of the [Danube] river like an ever-lengthening chain of lakes, and for those rare stretches where the valley ran east and west, the sunrise and the sunset lay reflected and still and an illusion lifted each lake a step higher than its predecessor until they formed gleaming staircases climbing in either direction; and at last the intervening headlands lost touch with the other shore and the watery stairs, now far below, cohered in a single liquid serpent.” (p. 154-155)
This is a well known and much loved travel book, recounting Patrick Leigh Fermor’s journey, mostly on foot, from Holland to Czechoslovakia, on his way to Constantinople. The second half of his journey is recounted in Between the Wood and the Water. He was 18 when he began his trek in December 1933, with little money and few contacts, but he was nevertheless welcomed by strangers and always seemed to find himself befriended when he needed it most, whether it was a fortuitous offer of a ride from a passing truck during a snowstorm, a chance meeting with two girls whose parents were away that gave him a warm and friendly place to stay for a few days when winter storms were raging, or a family that insisted he stay with them for their Christmas celebrations.
His descriptions of the lands he passed through are memorable, with deep forests and small villages, and every hilltop along the Rhine seemed to have its own ruined castle or keep. The Nazis had taken power in Germany only a few months before, and his accounts of meeting both supporters and opponents give a clear indication of the the uncertainty of the times. Although he saw Brownshirts marching and drilling, and recognized their thuggishness, he was mostly far removed from the evil that was already starting to manifest itself. He makes the point that it was still possible to love Germany for its culture. “Germany has a rich anthology of regional songs, and these, I think, were dreamy celebrations of the forests and plains of Westphalia, a long sigh of homesickness musically transposed. It was charming. And the charm made it impossible, at that moment, to connect the singers with organized bullying and the smashing of Jewish shop windows and nocturnal bonfires of books.” (p. 46)
Julia Boyd’s 2017 Travelers in the Third Reich looked at this specific topic, how people overlooked the obvious evil of Hitler’s Germany either because they supported it as a bulwark against Communism, or didn’t take time to notice what was going on around them.
Fermor found that he was completely out of his depth when it came to discussing the issues of the day. His upbringing “had produced nothing faintly resembling a grasp of politics and I’m forced to confess that, apart from a few predictable and almost subconscious prejudices, politically speaking, I didn’t know a damn.” (p. 121)
It was around this time that the Oxford Union had famously passed a resolution that “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” Fermor found himself questioned about it frequently and wanted to say that it should not be taken seriously, that it was more a provocation toward England’s leadership than a declaration of intent, but he had only a halting command of German, and failed to make his point.
A Time of Gifts was published in 1977, more than forty years after Fermor made his trip, and so his writing was informed by his experiences in World War II and after. His early notebooks containing much of his writings about his time in Germany were stolen while he was still on his trip, so it is impossible to know how much of the book is based on memories of his 18 year old self, and how much is interpolated from his later life. He was, however, a sensitive and compassionate young man, and he certainly would have been appalled by Nazism in theory and practice.
For a book written in the 1970s, it has an old-fashioned feel to it, a sense of formality that is not found in modern travel books. He often writes in page-long paragraphs, and his vocabulary is studded with obscure and antique words, to the point where I kept a dictionary beside me when I was reading, to look up words like teazle, polder, besom, palliasse, quincunx, eyot, alcaic, ramify, caracol, velleitie, and bosky. Just writing these words right now causes my spellchecker to furiously underline them and cast rude aspersions on my literacy.
Fermor’s depictions of rivers, forests, and winding paths are wonderful, and he lovingly describes the museums and churches he visited, as well as the beer halls. The book also picks up some odd bits of the times, such as the fact that saccharine smuggling was big business, and once he was rousted from his campsite and arrested on suspicion of being involved in the illegal sugar substitute trade.
There is also an elegiac feeling to the book. When he was writing it he knew what had happened to these beautiful places and their contented people: war, devastation, and for many of them the iron grip of Communism. The reader is also aware that this trip could not be repeated in today’s world of superhighways, enhanced security, and suspicion of foreigners, not to mention urban sprawl. As such, it is a slice-of-time narrative, a look at a specific situation that would soon be changed forever. It is nevertheless a fine book, and should be on the reading list of everyone who loves great travel writing.
This is a well known and much loved travel book, recounting Patrick Leigh Fermor’s journey, mostly on foot, from Holland to Czechoslovakia, on his way to Constantinople. The second half of his journey is recounted in Between the Wood and the Water. He was 18 when he began his trek in December 1933, with little money and few contacts, but he was nevertheless welcomed by strangers and always seemed to find himself befriended when he needed it most, whether it was a fortuitous offer of a ride from a passing truck during a snowstorm, a chance meeting with two girls whose parents were away that gave him a warm and friendly place to stay for a few days when winter storms were raging, or a family that insisted he stay with them for their Christmas celebrations.
His descriptions of the lands he passed through are memorable, with deep forests and small villages, and every hilltop along the Rhine seemed to have its own ruined castle or keep. The Nazis had taken power in Germany only a few months before, and his accounts of meeting both supporters and opponents give a clear indication of the the uncertainty of the times. Although he saw Brownshirts marching and drilling, and recognized their thuggishness, he was mostly far removed from the evil that was already starting to manifest itself. He makes the point that it was still possible to love Germany for its culture. “Germany has a rich anthology of regional songs, and these, I think, were dreamy celebrations of the forests and plains of Westphalia, a long sigh of homesickness musically transposed. It was charming. And the charm made it impossible, at that moment, to connect the singers with organized bullying and the smashing of Jewish shop windows and nocturnal bonfires of books.” (p. 46)
Julia Boyd’s 2017 Travelers in the Third Reich looked at this specific topic, how people overlooked the obvious evil of Hitler’s Germany either because they supported it as a bulwark against Communism, or didn’t take time to notice what was going on around them.
Newspaper attacks on the Nazis from the earliest months of the regime, anecdotal evidence of street violence and repression, the opening of Dachau just a few weeks after Hitler became chancellor and, above all, the book burning, in May 1933, should have alerted all would-be travelers to the reality of the new Germany. But once they were actually there, the propaganda was so pervasive and truth so distorted that many found themselves uncertain about what to believe. In addition, there were at this early stage respectable reasons for giving Hitler the benefit of the doubt – belief that his revolution would evolve into responsible government, guilt over the Treaty of Versailles or simply the memory of a good Germany holiday. (p. 369-370)
Fermor found that he was completely out of his depth when it came to discussing the issues of the day. His upbringing “had produced nothing faintly resembling a grasp of politics and I’m forced to confess that, apart from a few predictable and almost subconscious prejudices, politically speaking, I didn’t know a damn.” (p. 121)
It was around this time that the Oxford Union had famously passed a resolution that “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” Fermor found himself questioned about it frequently and wanted to say that it should not be taken seriously, that it was more a provocation toward England’s leadership than a declaration of intent, but he had only a halting command of German, and failed to make his point.
I could detect a kindling glint of scornful pity and triumph in the surrounding eyes which declared quite plainly their certainty that, were I right, England was too far gone in degeneracy and frivolity to present a problem. But the distress I could detect on the face of a silent opponent of the regime was still harder to bear: it hinted that the will or the capacity to save civilization was lacking where it might have been hoped for. Veterans of the War showed a sort of unpartisan sorrow at this falling-off. It sprang from the ambiguous love-hate for England many Germans felt. (p. 128-129)
A Time of Gifts was published in 1977, more than forty years after Fermor made his trip, and so his writing was informed by his experiences in World War II and after. His early notebooks containing much of his writings about his time in Germany were stolen while he was still on his trip, so it is impossible to know how much of the book is based on memories of his 18 year old self, and how much is interpolated from his later life. He was, however, a sensitive and compassionate young man, and he certainly would have been appalled by Nazism in theory and practice.
For a book written in the 1970s, it has an old-fashioned feel to it, a sense of formality that is not found in modern travel books. He often writes in page-long paragraphs, and his vocabulary is studded with obscure and antique words, to the point where I kept a dictionary beside me when I was reading, to look up words like teazle, polder, besom, palliasse, quincunx, eyot, alcaic, ramify, caracol, velleitie, and bosky. Just writing these words right now causes my spellchecker to furiously underline them and cast rude aspersions on my literacy.
Fermor’s depictions of rivers, forests, and winding paths are wonderful, and he lovingly describes the museums and churches he visited, as well as the beer halls. The book also picks up some odd bits of the times, such as the fact that saccharine smuggling was big business, and once he was rousted from his campsite and arrested on suspicion of being involved in the illegal sugar substitute trade.
There is also an elegiac feeling to the book. When he was writing it he knew what had happened to these beautiful places and their contented people: war, devastation, and for many of them the iron grip of Communism. The reader is also aware that this trip could not be repeated in today’s world of superhighways, enhanced security, and suspicion of foreigners, not to mention urban sprawl. As such, it is a slice-of-time narrative, a look at a specific situation that would soon be changed forever. It is nevertheless a fine book, and should be on the reading list of everyone who loves great travel writing.
February 8, 2018
In 1933, at the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on an extraordinary journey by foot - from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. "A Time of Gifts" is the first volume in a trilogy recounting the trip, and in this volume the reader accompanies him as far as Hungary.
It's an exceptional book. Published years after the event, in 1977, it still perfectly captures the wonder of his extraordinary journey and the many fascinating people he met on the way. What elevates this magical book are Patrick Leigh Fermor's gifts as a writer and the resultant delightful prose; his enthusiasm for knowledge and learning which peppers every page; and his personal charm which makes him as welcome in aristocratic homes as hostels or the homes of farm workers or labourers.
Patrick Leigh Fermor also provides an alternative cultural history of central Europe. His gifts for languages and history result in musings about Yiddish syntax, Byzantine plainsong, and most memorably the whereabouts of the coast of Bohemia as mentioned by Shakespeare (turns out it existed for 13 years but also turns out Shakespeare probably couldn't have cared less), and much much more.
So, in summary, a beautifully written travel book, that also serves as a history book, and in the company of the most charming and enthusiastic teenager it's possible to imagine. A remarkable book by a remarkable man. I look forward to the next volume, Between The Woods And The Water, though plan to read the recent biography Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper first. All in all this feels like the start of another beautiful relationship.
5/5
It's an exceptional book. Published years after the event, in 1977, it still perfectly captures the wonder of his extraordinary journey and the many fascinating people he met on the way. What elevates this magical book are Patrick Leigh Fermor's gifts as a writer and the resultant delightful prose; his enthusiasm for knowledge and learning which peppers every page; and his personal charm which makes him as welcome in aristocratic homes as hostels or the homes of farm workers or labourers.
Patrick Leigh Fermor also provides an alternative cultural history of central Europe. His gifts for languages and history result in musings about Yiddish syntax, Byzantine plainsong, and most memorably the whereabouts of the coast of Bohemia as mentioned by Shakespeare (turns out it existed for 13 years but also turns out Shakespeare probably couldn't have cared less), and much much more.
So, in summary, a beautifully written travel book, that also serves as a history book, and in the company of the most charming and enthusiastic teenager it's possible to imagine. A remarkable book by a remarkable man. I look forward to the next volume, Between The Woods And The Water, though plan to read the recent biography Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper first. All in all this feels like the start of another beautiful relationship.
5/5
December 15, 2017
This is a unique and impressive and special and fascinating and ... worthwhile book, but ... I just didn't love it. Indeed, much as I appreciated it, I struggled to stick with it. (I mean I ... really ... struggled....) As a result, I literally chipped away at it, reading it in chunks - some smaller, some larger - over the course of more than a year (which, for me, is highly unusual). In all fairness, when it did strike my fancy, I enjoyed lengthy sections, but ... over the course of nearly 16 months since I picked it up, it seemed there was always something else I was more interested in reading.... Most telling is that I discovered, and read the first three (3) installments in Anthony Powell's acclaimed period-piece, the A Dance to the Music of Time series, during that period, and I kept thinking that, if this book/series were fiction, I'd expect the characters to continually cross paths as the two series progressed....
Stepping back, Before Bill Bryson, before Tim Moore, and in a world far away from the railroad tracks that captivated Paul Theroux, Patrick Leigh Fermor went walking.... And he went walking at a time when the world was very, very different, and very much in flux. He's not as funny as Bryson or Moore, he's not covering similar ground to Theroux, but his quest is a legitimate epic, his encounters extraordinary, his contacts (made and later re-connected) remind of some of the extraordinary connections found in the Colombian exposition detailed in Devil in the White City, and ... he ... can ... write.
So many positives: chapeau to the author, for his journey, for his moxie, for his historical forays, for his footnotes, for his keen eye, for his bravado, for his fearlessness, for his derring-do, for his vocabulary, and for his overall effort.
And yet .... The book seized my attention initially, and I was captivated throughout the departure and ... then ... it just began to drag.
Closing riff: if you're a vocabulary snob, or if you're looking for a good resource to help prepare for any type of vocabulary examination or competition, this one's for you. I'm hard pressed to think of another book so rich in opportunities to consistently look up and learn new, creative, little used, and fun-to-play-with words....
Stepping back, Before Bill Bryson, before Tim Moore, and in a world far away from the railroad tracks that captivated Paul Theroux, Patrick Leigh Fermor went walking.... And he went walking at a time when the world was very, very different, and very much in flux. He's not as funny as Bryson or Moore, he's not covering similar ground to Theroux, but his quest is a legitimate epic, his encounters extraordinary, his contacts (made and later re-connected) remind of some of the extraordinary connections found in the Colombian exposition detailed in Devil in the White City, and ... he ... can ... write.
So many positives: chapeau to the author, for his journey, for his moxie, for his historical forays, for his footnotes, for his keen eye, for his bravado, for his fearlessness, for his derring-do, for his vocabulary, and for his overall effort.
And yet .... The book seized my attention initially, and I was captivated throughout the departure and ... then ... it just began to drag.
Closing riff: if you're a vocabulary snob, or if you're looking for a good resource to help prepare for any type of vocabulary examination or competition, this one's for you. I'm hard pressed to think of another book so rich in opportunities to consistently look up and learn new, creative, little used, and fun-to-play-with words....
April 11, 2018
Travelogue by author written in 1970’s recounting his travels as an 18 year old in the early 1930’s. Having being expelled from a series of schools he decided to set out on his travels. Initially intending to sleep in the open and in barns – he found at first that he was often put up by people he met and then via a fortuitous had letters of introduction to various members of the remnants of the lower ranks of the nobility and spent much of his travels staying in castles.
His account is very detailed (with particular conversations 40 years earlier recounted almost word for word) sometimes this is plausible due to diaries he kept (and in some cases rediscovered) but is much less convincing for the first part of the journey (where he lost his diary).
The author’s English is beautifully descriptive and full of learned allusions. It conjours up a lost pre-war world of Middle-Europe including the different states of Germany and the new states setting up as the Austro-Hungarian empire fades – with a huge variation in language, dialogue, dress and (a common theme) alcohol now largely subsumed by Globalisation. Overshadowing this – particularly in Bavaria and Austria is the rise of the Nazi menace (particularly important to the author who worked as an undercover agent in Crete and Greece in the later war) – although all references to this are in parts where his diary was lost (and so unlike “Suite Francaise” are inevitably retrospectively edited.
The lost-world theme is emphasised by the filter the author’s education and cultural knowledge (which he considers by the standard of the day weak) give him on art, architecture, history (particularly and interestingly the fringes of the Roman Empire and the battle grounds of the Thirty Years War) literature and poetry; and even by the weather (with the first months of his journey dominated by a real winter).
His account is very detailed (with particular conversations 40 years earlier recounted almost word for word) sometimes this is plausible due to diaries he kept (and in some cases rediscovered) but is much less convincing for the first part of the journey (where he lost his diary).
The author’s English is beautifully descriptive and full of learned allusions. It conjours up a lost pre-war world of Middle-Europe including the different states of Germany and the new states setting up as the Austro-Hungarian empire fades – with a huge variation in language, dialogue, dress and (a common theme) alcohol now largely subsumed by Globalisation. Overshadowing this – particularly in Bavaria and Austria is the rise of the Nazi menace (particularly important to the author who worked as an undercover agent in Crete and Greece in the later war) – although all references to this are in parts where his diary was lost (and so unlike “Suite Francaise” are inevitably retrospectively edited.
The lost-world theme is emphasised by the filter the author’s education and cultural knowledge (which he considers by the standard of the day weak) give him on art, architecture, history (particularly and interestingly the fringes of the Roman Empire and the battle grounds of the Thirty Years War) literature and poetry; and even by the weather (with the first months of his journey dominated by a real winter).
March 6, 2014
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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