#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

[mioritic]

Adrian Daintrey, RWA (1902 - 1988)

“Portrait of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in Cretan costume”

Chatsworth Estate

[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…

[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.

[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

[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.

[newloverofbeauty]

John Craxton (left) and Patrick Leigh Fermor (right), Serifos, Greece,  (1951)

John Craxton lived for pleasure and painted it too. Born in October 1922, this heroic hedonist was gladly gay and thus a criminal in Britain until his 45th year. Nomadic and anarchic, he blithely ignored the rules by escaping into his own private world from the start. The patron Peter Watson set up John Craxton and Lucian Freud in adjoining studios – priming the co-conspirators to work on their inventive and subversive art without hindrance and then to explode in rampages through blitzed London and beyond. Meeting when aged 19, they would be best friends through their twenties. For all their intimacy, John felt he was being tested sexually and feared emotional blackmail. So there was probably no Freudian slip when Lucian said, amid their bitter estrangement several decades later: “I never knew Johnny was queer. Not for ages.”

[thelibraryiscool]

23 books for 2023

this could never be an exhaustive list, but I thought I’d jot down some books I’m excited to get to this year -- and we’ll see how many I really hit! as a side note, this doesn’t include any series I’m planning to continue/read from more, like tana french or cixin liu.

Corregiodora by Gail Jones

Hiver à Sokcho [Winter in Sokcho] by Elisa Shua Dusapin << read her Vladivostok Circus instead and enjoyed it, so just postponing this one for next year

Der Zug war pünktlich [The Train Was on Time] by Heinrich Böll << in progress

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager << dnf. did not even get very far. great concept but could not get on with the writing

The Life of Arsenyev [Жизнь Арсеньева] by Ivan Bunin

The Old Woman With the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo 

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith 

Marriage by Susan Ferrier

How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić << in progress

Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto

Désorientale [Disoriental] by Négar Djavadi << in progress

The Lviv Saga [Львівська сага] by Petro Yatsenko

Bleu blanc vert [Blue White Green] by Maïssa Bey

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople by Patrick Leigh Fermor

1919 by Eve L. Ewing

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

A Home for Dom [Ді�� для Дома] by Victoria Amelina

Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz

Asia & Haiti by Will Alexander

Wound [Рана] by Oksana Vasyakina

Ghost Music by An Yu << read her Braised Pork and thought it was just ok, so will not be reading this one any time soon

Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

and because there’s no rule that says you can’t start a tag thing if you weren’t tagged in one, i shall tag @dauen, @canonicallyanxious, @nonbinaryjomarch, @queenofattolia, @booksnpictures, @fluencylevelfrench and anyone else who wants to do the same xD

[70s80sandbeyond]

John Craxton and Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1951