#patrick leigh fermor

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Live, don't know how long, And die, don't know when; Must go, don't know where; I am astonished I am so cheerful.

- Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water

[warpwoof]

Patrick Leigh Fermor

These summer nights are short. Going to bed before midnight is unthinkable and talk, wine, moonlight and the warm air are often in league to defer it one, two or three hours more. It seems only a moment after falling asleep out of doors that dawn touches one gently on the shoulder, and, completely refreshed, up one gets, or creeps into the shade or indoors for another luxurious couple of hours. The afternoon is the time for real sleep: into the abyss one goes to emerge when the colours begin to revive and the world to breathe again about five o'clock, ready once more for the rigours and pleasures of late afternoon, the evening, and the night.

[morgan--reads]

Summary: In 1933, young Patrick Leigh Fermor began walking from the Netherlands to Constantinople, his journey taking him through the heart of Europe during the last days before WWII.  

Quote: “The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.”

My rating: 4.0/5.0   Goodreads: 4.06/5.0 

Review: It takes some time to get immersed in the dense but lovely prose of Fermor’s reminiscences, but it is time worth spending. Fermor is charming and full of wonder, his observations covering his natural surroundings and the people he encounters are poignant and unpretentious. He journeys to parts of Europe I’ve never heard of, but am now totally in love with. As it’s a retrospective memoir, there’s also a bittersweet nostalgia for a version of Europe that has been lost forever. This short volume only takes Fermor as far as Hungary—it takes another two for him to finish his journey—but I’m not sure that I’ll read the sequels. This volume feels perfectly complete on its own.

[pier-carlo-universe]

Camminando fra i boschi e l’acqua: Un viaggio a piedi in Europa sulle tracce di Patrick Leigh Fermor. Recensione di Alessandria today

Da Hoek van Holland al Corno d'Oro, un cammino alla scoperta dell'Europa e della sua anima profonda, narrato da Nick Hunt

Da Hoek van Holland al Corno d’Oro, un cammino alla scoperta dell’Europa e della sua anima profonda, narrato da Nick Hunt. Camminando fra i boschi e l’acqua di Nick Hunt è un libro di viaggio che rievoca l’impresa del leggendario viaggiatore Patrick Leigh Fermor, il quale attraversò l’Europa negli anni ’30. Settant’anni dopo, Hunt decide di ripercorrere lo stesso itinerario, partendo da Hoek van…

[cryingoflot49]

Book Review

Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Patrick Leigh Fermor was an English college dropout who walked across Europe between the two world wars and wrote a trilogy of books about the experience. The first volume, A Time of Gifts, was poorly written and often a chore to read although it did pick up momentum in the second half of the book. The second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, is a vast improvement.

Leigh Fermor begins this book by crossing the Danube River from Slovakia into Hungary. He is immediately greeted with warm welcomes and taken to a procession and celebratory mass in a Catholic church for the end of Lent. He proceeds on to Budapest, has an amazing time, and moves on to hike across the Great Hungarian Plain, the western most steppe of that geographical feature spreading all the way to Mongolia. He continues to have interesting encounters with the country folk and even spends a night with a camp of Romani people. Despite all he has heard about their criminal tendencies, the night passes without incident to his pleasant surprise. As he gets closer to the border with Romania, he starts staying in upper class villas owned by people he made contact with during his previous travels. What is great about this whole section is the vivid description of the landscape, something that he improves on as he goes farther along. His portrayal of the upper classes, as well as the other people he meets, is of higher quality too. Maybe Hungarians are just more exciting people than the Germans he writes about in the previous volume, but they are more interesting and lively in these chapters than anything he had written before.

One interesting part of his journey through Hungary is the intellectual curiosity and passion for reading that Leigh Fermor shows while he stays with the Hungarian aristocrats. One thing he does when he visits them is read the books they have collected in their personal libraries. Some of the weakest and most muddled passages of A Time of Gifts are those where he struggles to explain historical events from the places he visits. It is some seriously bad writing, but here in Between the Woods and the Water he does a far better job of explaining with clarity all the entanglements of people who either migrated to Hungary, traveled through it, or tried to conquer it. This is tough subject matter including tribes of Avars and Goths, later settlements by Huns and Magyars, invasions by Mongols, Germans, and Ottoman Turks, and eventual collaboration with the Habsburg kingdom. He makes some sharp observations about the Magyar language too. His ability to comprehend and describe the syntaxes of all the languages he encounters while traveling is impressive even if he never fully masters the complexities of Magyar. Being able to explain what an agglutinative language is is good enough.

As Leigh Fermor continues into Romania, he keeps calling on contacts he made through others he met in Hungary. His original plans to sleep in forests, fields, and farms gets scrapped as he continuously gets invited into the homes of aristocrats, living a high and leisurely life with them. They enjoy his company so much that their hospitality seems to be without end. The downside of this is that as he travels southwards into Transylvania, most of the people he associates with are ethnic Hungarians and Swabians, but he encounters far fewer Romanians. Transylvania was formerly part of Hungary and Romania incorporated it into their country when the Habsburg Empire broke up after World War I. The author is acutely aware of the tensions between the two groups as, yet he continuously maintains optimism in the possibility of them all uniting under the banner of one nation despite their separate identities.

Socially speaking, he spends a lot of time with an interesting character named Istvan who takes him on a series of adventures. One interesting part is when the two are swimming nude in a river and two farm girls see them, taunt them, and encourage them to chase after them where something or other happens behind a hay rick. What happens there is left to your imagination, but if it involves two naked men it shouldn’t be hard to figure out. Istvan also takes Leigh Fermor and Angela, a married woman from Budapest, on a car ride around the western edge of Transylvania. Leigh Fermor and Angela are having a fling and Istvan wants to make sure they are out of the sight of nosy neighbors who won’t mind their own business. Along the way, the author continues to expound his knowledge about Romanian history as they visit castle ruins in the mountains. He clearly informs his readers about the lives of John Hunyadi and Vlad Tepes, the count who inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula.

Leigh Fermor then goes off on foot again, trekking through the western edge of Transylvania along the Mures River, connecting again later with the Danube before crossing over into Bulgaria. His descriptions of the mountains are incredible. He uses language to capture the weather, the running water, the plants, the trees, the sounds, the mist,and various other people he meets along the way. Some of the best descriptive writing involves animals; he wakes up one morning to look over a cliff where he sees a golden eagle stretch its wings before taking off in flight, being joined by another eagle. This passage is magnificent.

There isn’t much to dislike about this book. Not all of the writing is perfect, but there are so many more high points in comparison to the first volume of this trilogy that the low points ca be easily overlooked. It is interesting to see how the author’s literary skills grow before your eyes as he continues to write. It also helps that Hungary and Romania are far more interesting countries than Germany or Austria where the author traveled in A Time of Gifts.

Between the Woods and the Water is an exciting travelogue and work of descriptive prose. In it, we see where Patrick Leigh Fermor improves on all the problems he had in the previous book and watching this process of growth unfold is one of this book’s charms. The author is a Romantic at heart and by that I refer specifically to the Romantic movement that preceded the Victorian literary style. But Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Romanticism is a little different; he has the sublimity of nature, the castle ruins, the passage of time, and the push towards transcendence, but at the young age of nineteen, he is too young to wallow in a hopeless longing for the past and the melancholia that the Romantic poets insisted on indulging in. He travels and writes in the here and now as if he loves every minute of it.

[nextwavefutures]

A Time of Gifts

A Time of Gifts—Patrick Leigh Fermor’s classic travel book takes you to a lost world, and a lost time. New post on Around The Edges.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts was published in 1977, more than 40 years after the events it describes, and after Leigh Fermor had published a lot of other travel books. It tells the story of a walk across Europe as a teenager, starting just before Xmas 1933, from Rotterdam to Constantinople, as it was called then. (It takes two more books to get all the way to Constantinople). It’s a…

[mariacallous]

Me: *logs on to tumblr to see what’s going on*

Tumblr dash: Here’s Jared Leto in a giant fucking cat suit.

Me:

[noxaeternaetc]

Lucas van Valckenborch (1535-1597) Winter landscape (January or February) 1586. Detail, oil on canvas.

Patrick Leigh Fermor on walking through Germany in the 1930's:

"Vague speculation thrives in weather like this. The world is muffled in white, motor-roads and telegraph-poles vanish, a few castles appear in the middle distance; everything slips back hundreds of years. The details of the landscape - the leafless trees, the sheds, the church towers, the birds and the animals, the sledges and the woodmen, the sliced ricks and the occasional cowmen driving a floundering herd from barn to barn - all these stand out dark in isolation against the snow, distinct and momentous. Objects expand or shrink and the change makes the scenery resemble early woodcuts of winter husbandry. Sometimes the landscape moves it further back in time. Pictures from illuminated manuscripts take shape; they become the scenes which old brevaries and Books of Hours enclosed in the O of Orate, fratres. The snow falls; it is Carolingian weather…"

From A Time of Gifts, 1977.

[sgiandubh]

I must have missed it recently but from a post I read yesterday I think you have you left your position and are moving? Or is this something that happens often in your line of work?

Dear Position Anon,

When you are a diplomat, you must also be ready to change places on the regular. Staying indefinitely in a country is not really encouraged, as the longer you stay, the more biased or blasé you can become: it's called 'going native' (I know, that's an idiom, nothing more).

Before the Industrial Revolution, the world was a much bigger place than now. People like Ruy González de Clavijo were not expected to return anytime soon to Madrid, from his embassy to Tamerlane, in 1403. Others were posted for life to Venice, to Versailles or to Munich, especially from the Renaissance and until the Congress of Vienna, in 1815. But this (bad) habit was gradually abandoned, thank God!

Five years and a half spent here are more than enough, even if I will always feel like three of them were robbed by COVID (and, unlike many other colleagues, I did go on holiday in the islands in 2020, because otherwise my brain would have burst). Anyways, all this time flies by in a jiffy.

Where next? I wish I knew and, despite the general fantasy, you never get to choose the where and when. Also, you are rarely sent to familiar places and stepping into the unknown is one of the greatest appeals of this job, to me. Until then, I am homeward bound, for a while. That is a much, much needed decompression chamber moment.

I will always, always come back to this view, Anon, but I prefer to do it without the extra daily life pressure, to be honest. This is a lazy summer evening in Kardamyli, in the sublime Mani Peninsula, a place Patrick Leigh Fermor never left:

Taken by me, in 2021. As for the rest, I'll keep you posted. I am ready to say good-bye. Farewell? Never.

[onekindredspirit]

The Dickensian Bookshop

Each time I pass through this small town I try to spend some time at the Dickensian Bookshop, one of my favourite second hand booksellers.

As I approached the store I saw an old man (not the guy in my photo) clinging to a Give Way sign across the street.

I browsed the shop window display and didn’t need to look to know that he would be closing in on me. I’m a magnet for the unusual.

When I did look up he was a metre away and intense with energy. I looked into him but I didn’t sense any malice, at least not for me.

“I’m looking for HOODS!” he said. He pronounced the word hoods with considerably more emphasis than the rest of the sentence, which I found interesting.

In this once English colony, the word hood is easily recognised as a variant of hoodlum. It’s just that we stopped using the words hood and hoodlum a long time ago.

Anyway, I’ve found from my experience with interesting people that mirroring is comforting for them.

“HOODS?” I yelled back at him.

“Yes, HOODS! I’m looking to rough me up some HOODS!”

“Rough me up” of course means to hit and otherwise treat roughly, people in need of ill treatment. In this context, HOODS.

“Well I’m sure you’ll find plenty of HOODS in this town.” I said.

I could see that this was new information for him and also, that I was probably the most agreeable person he’d met recently.

He considered things for a moment, his clenched fists churning in a low ready position, as if remembering what it was like to be a boxer from a long time ago, and then suddenly, he went blank.

With the right equipment I could probably have shown you the exact place in his brain where a tangle of malignant protein was blocking the vital connection to the spot where he had saved those memories of his youth as a boxing man.

Instead, I took his cerebral misfire as an opportunity to gracefully slip into the bookstore and I closed the door deliberately behind me. I didn’t want to discover, upon his reanimation, that I now looked like a hoodlum to him.

“He’s looking for hoods.” I said to the lovely person behind the little desk by the door.

“Oh dear. I saw him hanging onto a sign over there.” and they motioned vaguely with their head. “I hope he’s okay.”

“I think he has dementia. He’s quite hunched and kind of shuffles when he walks but it doesn’t feel too bad yet. I mean, I don’t think he’s lost or anything and ... I didn’t sense any fear in him.”

I spent 20 minutes in this wonderful bookstore, in the midst of this wonderful life and grateful that it was not yet my turn to cling to signs.

I bought a biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, a book of photographs by the painter Alphonse Mucha and the graphic novel/anthology American Splendor - The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar.

Of course, none of this ends well for us. I watched one of my best friends die in mortal fear and my father suffered panic attacks as his end drew near. I hope to be brave, I hope to laugh in the face of death and, if given the opportunity, I hope also to cling to many signs, in particular, those that instruct me to Give Way and to Yield.

- One Kindred Spirit

 Silver Print

[kebriones]

'They are wild and shy and not accustomed to talk.' He pointed straight up into the air. The canyon was closing round us. 'They see nothing but God.'

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani

[blackswaneuroparedux]

A little later, as we talked of the Maniot dirges by which I was obsessed, I was surprised to hear this bloodshot-eyed and barefoot old man say: “Yes, it’s the old iambic tetrameter acalectic.” It was the equivalent of a Cornish fisherman pointing out the difference, in practicality incomprehensible dialect, between the Petrachian and the Spenserian sonnet. It was quite correct. Where on earth had he learnt it? His last bit of information was that, in the old days (that wonderful cupboard!) the Arabs used to come to this coast to dive for the murex.

- Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

The Mani, at the tip of Greece and Europe’s southernmost  promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is  still very much a part of its people’s daily lives.

Patrick Leigh Fermor bridged the  genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an  ancient world living alongside the 20th Century. The book confirmed his reputation as one of the English language’s finest writers of prose. In this delightful book, Patrick Leigh Fermor carries the reader with him on  his journeys among the Greeks of the mountains, exploring their history  and time-honoured lore.

[liefst]

not feeling great but trying to take care of myself with soup and vitamins and all the other illnes attributes. started patrick leigh fermor's a time of gifts which i bought in a tiny book shop on amorgos last summer but hadn't read yet. it's beautifully written! what a jewel. i think this is going to be a new favourite.

[70s80sandbeyond]

John Craxton and Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1951

[ghostoftonantzin]

Books I’ve read this year, roughly in order

I’ve decided to make a record of all the books I read this year, and post it on tumblr, because why not. Of the books I read, nine were on my phone (thank you libby), one was an audiobook (before I remembered that I’m terrible at listening to audiobooks), and eight were short story collections (some of these were also ebooks). In order, with some thoughts, below the cut:

Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss- a reread, and just as good the second time around. Compact and tense, with a slow creeping sense of dread.

The Violins of Saint Jacques, Patrick Leigh Fermor- the back of this book frames it around the volcanic eruption at the end of the book. The framing device is about how the woman telling the story was the only survivor of the volcanic eruption at the end of this book. It’s not a surprise, and yet when it happens, it’s so sudden and violent and all-encompassing that it’s still shocking.

Faceless Killers- found this in the books app on my phone (long story) and tore through it in a day. Enjoyable, dark, and twisty.

Small Gods, Terry Pratchett- same books app find as Faceless Killers, and the first Pratchett book I’ve read that isn’t Good Omens. I enjoyed it, especially Pratchett’s sense of humor. I do intend to read more Discworld books, though they’re not at the top of my list.

A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes- I feel like I enjoyed reading the long article analyzing the social context of the setting almost as much as I enjoyed reading the book, though that’s not entirely a knock on it. It seemed to hover in a strange space between a children’s story and one that’s too bleak for children.

Matrix, Lauren Groff- very readable and great at drawing you into the world of the medieval monastery.

The Traveling Grave, L.P. Hartley- unfortunately, I feel like I can barely remember any of the stories in this one, though I did enjoy it. It’s more creeping dread than outright horror.

Skin Tight, Carl Hiaasen- the audiobook! Also a reread of a book I’d initially read maybe ten years ago. It’s not my favorite Hiaasen book, but it’s still a good one. (I also started listening to the audiobook for Sick Puppy, but never finished.)

Where the Wild Ladies Are, Aoko Matsuda- part of my efforts to read short stories, and also more works in translation. I liked it, though I don’t have much to say about it.

Basic Black with Pearls, Helen Weinzweig- I feel like I read a lot of this in a warm bath in the middle of winter, which may have affected my opinion, but I really loved this. A married woman wanders around her hometown of Toronto, supposedly there to meet up with her secret-agent lover who she has followed all over the world, and who may or may not be real. But the meat of this book is in the encounters she has while wandering the city, and how they tie into her own past and the legacy of the Holocaust. It’s a strange, dreamlike book, and it’s stuck with me.

The Book of Difficult Fruit, Kate Lebo- I honestly expected this to contain more scientific and historical background on the fruits and less aspects of personal essays, but that’s more of a problem with me than the book.

Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Vol. 1, multiple authors- a good read. The editors at Valancourt seem very good at selecting stories for their short story collections.

Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir- I downloaded the free sample from Libby at the airport, then immediately checked out the full book and read it in a day. I fell in love with Gideon as a character and narrator, and the ending was both tragic and exactly what I wanted.

Good Behavior, Molly Keane- like drinking vinegar littered with glass shards, in the best way possible. Wonderfully subtle and full of darker implications. The kicker is a killer.

Crocodilia, Philip Ridley- the narration in this felt very amateurish at times, though as the novel went on, I found it worked well to get me into the mindset of the narrator. The novel becomes an incredible puzzle box of twists and stories folding in on themselves and repeating, while still maintaining its core focus on first love and coming of age as a young gay man.

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir- I also tore through this in a day, though it made me miss Gideon even more.

Song for the Unraveling of the World, Brian Evenson- I’ve read a lot of praise for Evenson’s writing, and I did enjoy this book, though it didn’t draw me in. Also read on the Libby app, which may have affected my opinion.

Wise Children, Angela Carter- realized this year I wanted to read more Angela Carter, because the only thing I’d read by her was The Bloody Chamber, and that was a shame, because I love her writing. I loved this. It’s sprawling and dramatic, but filled with so much joy and zest for life.

Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, Teffi- I read most of this while getting my car serviced. That has nothing to do with anything, just wanted to mention it. Beautifully written, but also a fascinating look at the uncertainty of exile, and yet how life seems to go on in fits and starts.

The Pure and the Impure, Colette- beautiful writing, again. Just fascinating to read about queer communities in Paris in the early twentieth century.

A Certain Hunger, Chelsea G. Summers- read in the Libby app, after I’d had my eye on this book. I remember wondering while reading what the narrator thought about Ruth Reichl, only for her to mention her a few pages later. In my opinion, the food writing aspects of this novel were relatively weak for a novel supposedly based around it. Unfortunately, I feel like the book was blandly heterosexual in a way I found uninteresting. I do think this novel stuck the landing, though, in a way that made me appreciate the rest of it more.

Growing Things, Paul G. Tremblay- also read in the Libby app. Notes from the Dog Walker was the standout story for me, though I enjoyed the rest of it enough to consider seeking out some of his novels.

Deep Blue Good-by, John D. MacDonald- I tore through two Travis McGee books in the Libby app after reading about the author while looking up Carl Hiaasen trivia. I honestly haven't read a ton of thrillers, but it was fascinatingly emotional and honest about the pain the protagonist experiences for a detective novel from the 1960s.

Nightmare in Pink, John D. MacDonald- The other Travis McGee novel, also read on my phone. Certain lines of this book still haunt me.

A Nail, A Rose, Madeleine Bourdouxhe- actually started in early 2021, but I only finished it this year. Another short story collection, this time primarily about ordinary women in France and Belgium around World War II. Well-written, but I didn’t personally love it.

Lolly Willows, Sylvia Townsend Warner- more sedately paced than I expected, but the final conversation between Laura and the devil is astoundingly ahead of its time. In retrospect, it’s an interestingly subtle take on the power fantasy suggested by the blurb on the back.

The Alteration, Kingsley Amis- read before writing evviva il coltello. I would classify this as science fiction, but its entire focus on a world less technologically-developed than our own was an interesting twist. (Though I don’t read a lot of science fiction, so I couldn’t give you the proper context of whether it’s actually unusual.) Very much of its time.

The Juniper Tree, Barbara Comyns- I hate to say it, but my favorite part of the book was probably the cover. Fascinatingly timeless in its setting and an interesting update on the fairytale, but didn’t compel me.

A Night in the Lonesome October, Roger Zelazny- my second year reading this over the month of October, and I intend to do so next year. It perfectly encapsulates the feeling of “spooky season”.

The Collector, John Fowles- I’d heard of this book years ago, and was suddenly seized with the need to read it. Creepy, though it did feel like the plot dragged in places, though that’s understandable for its format.

Ghost Sequences, A. C. Wise- the blurb compares her writing to Angela Carter, which I don’t think is quite accurate; her prose doesn’t quite capture the same poetic highs of Carter’s work. But I enjoyed the stories in this collection, especially their incorporation of different forms of media in both form and theme, whether it’s apps or newspaper article excerpts.

Isolde, Irina Odoyevtseva- I originally read this in early 2021, but decided to revisit it this year. Excellently written in what it conceals through the narration, and simultaneously glittery and bleak. It’s a fascinating snapshot of the lives of young Russian emigres in France, post 1917.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis- started sometime in July, and repeatedly picked up and set down, which is really not the best way to read a book that’s dense with literary and philosophical references that I’m not familiar with.

[cryingoflot49]

BOOK REVIEW

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

What a disappointment. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British student, drops out of school at the age of eighteen and goes on a walking tour of Europe that starts in the Netherlands and ends in Constantinople (now Istanbul). He sets out in 1934 and sees the interwar continent from ground level while the menace of the Nazi movement begins taking hold in Germany. It sounds like an exciting subject for a book. Unfortunately, A Time of Gifts, the first book in Leigh Fermor’s trilogy about his travels, doesn’t live up to its promise.

The book starts off poorly with a biographical letter written to a friend that serves as an introduction. We learn that the author is a smart student with undying curiosity for all aspects of education, maybe a potential Renaissance man type. He is also a bit of a screw up, lacking in discipline and direction, seeking out the company of bohemian types who prefer partying to studying. So Leigh Fermor drops out of school and walks across Europe, writing about it all along the way. The problem at this point is that his prose is so choppy that it becomes a chore to read almost immediately.

The writing starts getting better as he walks across the flat, winter landscape of the Netherlands and over the border into Germany. Rather than actually describing what he sees, he instead imagines himself entering into the painted world of Flemish painters, most specifically Breughel, and the enchanting winter scenes they depict. It’s certainly an interesting idea, but I would have been more satisfied if he had written more about what he had actually encountered there.

Leigh Fermor’s descriptions of the northern European landscape doesn’t do much to arouse interest. He tries too hard at times to be poetic, sometimes going into flights of abstract language, complete with arcane Britishisms and vocabulary that hasn’t survived to our current day. A dictionary might come in handy here, but if you look up every word he uses that you don’t know, you may never finish the book. Some of the descriptions are just plain awful. There are some long passages where I couldn’t tell if he was described the landscape, a painting, a book, a piece if music, or the clouds in the sky and ended up not caring enough to re-read them for a full understanding. His attempts at describing the history of the regions he walks though are also impossibly muddled to the point of frustration so that I felt like giving up a few times.

On the plus side, the cities and towns he visits are a little more palatable. In the beginning he sets off with the intention of sleeping in forests, fields, and barns along the way, but he has a knack for making friends with the locals and, like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, he always depends on the kindness of strangers. Everywhere he goes he meets up with people who are willing to feed and shelter him. Some of them are more interesting than others. Most of them contact other people they know in places further along the road to Leigh Fermor’s destination so he ditches his plans for sleeping like a vagrant and ends up staying with a network of upper class aristocrats. He starts off sleeping in fields and farms, but ends up staying in chateaus and castles.

His impulses also drive him to debauchery which, unfortunately he never describes in detail. In one passage he stays in an apartment with two beautiful young madchens while their parents are away on business. In this, and other scenarios, he doesn’t say everything that goes on between them, but if you read between the lines it is quite obvious. Leigh Fermor has a strange kind of Victorian approach to his writing style that seems out of place for a twentieth century narrative.

Another thing to notice as he travels through Germany and Austria is the creeping encroachment of the Nazis who he briefly encounters at various times. He expresses disdain for them, and so do most of the people he befriends, but he doesn’t condemn them very loudly. H even socializes with them amicably a couple times; I don’t think his intention is to warm up to them, but rather to keep out of trouble. Being an English citizen in Germany at that time could be risky and he seemed to be mostly concerned with playing it safe, not with sympathizing with their cause. He is actually open to speaking with anybody he meets, even with the Romani and Jewish populations that the European host societies routinely treat as second-class citizens.

The narrative starts improving when the author gets to Vienna. While staying at a Salvation Army homeless shelter, he meets a slightly eccentric man named Konrad who comes from the Frisian Islands off the north coast of the Netherlands. Konrad convinces him to make money by sketching people’s portraits, so Leigh Fermor goes door to door with his sales pitch and does well-enough to live a little more comfortably. The scenes inside the people’s apartments are some of the most amusing and interesting parts of this book. He does a good job of describing urban Vienna too.

From there, Leigh Fermor walks east along the Danube, skirting the southern border of Slovakia and eventually crossing the river into Hungary. What is interesting about this is that the prose continues to get better the farther along he goes. Reading this book is like watching somebody learning how to write and making improvements with each passing page. This only makes me wish that he had revised the first half of the book more effectively; starting a book with disastrous writing and progressing towards smoother, more polished and descriptive prose, albeit prose that is average at best, is not a good writing strategy. But at least the auther redeems himself a bit by the end.

My biggest criticism of this travel narrative is that Leigh Fermor followed a literary axiom too closely. They say a good author not only knows about what to put into their work, but also what to leave out or eliminate. Leigh Fermor leaves out too much. His descriptions of the countryside are sparse, especially in the beginning and he meanders into poorly written explanations of historical events instead, and never getting around to saying what he actually feels as he walks. He never mentions the cold or the wind. His feet never ache or get sore. He never feels tired or hungry. He simply doesn’t address all five of the human senses. When he says he gets drunk, he never explains how that actually feels. He leaves too much up to the imagination so that his prose comes off as flat, shallow, and one dimensional.

A Time of Gifts captured my interest because I have backpacked across Europe and went to a lot of the places that Patrick Leigh Fermor visited. I wanted to see how he described them as they were in the 1930s. His execution of the writing didn’t satisfy my curiosity, but considering it improved a bit in the second half, I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time reading this. Hopefully the second volume of this trilogy will be better.