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A Time of Gifts (Trilogy #1)

by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Jan Morris (Introduction)

4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 · rating details · 1,357 ratings · 211 reviews

In 1933 Patrick Leigh Fermor was eighteen. Expelled from school for a flirtation with a local girl, he headed to London to set up as a writer, only to find that dream harder to realize than expected. Then he had the idea of leaving his troubles behind; he would “change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp . . . travel on foot, sleep in...more

Paperback, 321 pages

Published October 3rd 2005 by NYRB Classics (first published 1977)

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Jan 24, 2012 Adam Floridia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: discovered-thanks-to-goodreads, being-a-teen

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:

reading

Actually, it was more like this:

reading

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...more

27 likes · like · see review

Aug 24, 2011 Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 20th-century-postwar-to-late, cultural-meetings, the-continent, 20th-century-early-to-mid, worlds-lost-dead-and-dying, beyond-the-horizon

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 t...more 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.
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Sep 06, 2011 brian rated it 3 of 5 stars

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 temper...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Bettie rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: 3Ms

Recommended to Bettie by: Carey Combe

Shelves: published-1977, autumn-2012, travel, nonfiction, one-penny-wonder, 3m-bookshelf-challenge, autobiography-memoir

----------------------

Three opening quotes, this one is the title source:

  
For now the time of gifts is gone -
O boys that grow, O snows that melt,
O bathos that the years must fill -
Here is dull earth to build upon
Undercoated; we have reached
Twelfth Night or what you will...you will

Three opening quotes, this one is the title source:

  
For now the time of gifts is gone -
O boys that grow, O snows that melt,
O bathos that the years must fill -
Here is dull earth to build upon
Undercoated; we have reached
Twelfth Night or what you will...you will

Introductory Letter to Xan Fielding

Map

Opening:

THE LOW COUNTRIES

'A splendid afternoon to set out!', said one of the friends who was seeing me off, peering at the rain and rolling up the window.

Hadn't meant to start this one quite yet but it was the smallest nearest-to-hand book to stick in my pocket as I rushed out of the door to go to the Cuckoo Shop to garner kilt hose yarn. By the time we arrived I was in Germany, in 1933, and entranced with the writing. Fantastic so far.

Albert Sterner 1910

Who rides, so late, through night and wind?
It is the father with his child.
He has the boy well in his arm
He holds him safely, he keeps him warm.

"My son, why do you hide your face so anxiously?"
"Father, do you not see the Elfking?
The Elfking with crown and tail?"
"My son, it's a wisp of fog."

"You dear child, come, go with me!
Very lovely games I'll play with you;
Some colourful flowers are on the beach,
My mother has some golden robes."

"My father, my father, and don't you hear
What the Elfking quietly promises me?"
"Be calm, stay calm, my child;
The wind is rustling through withered leaves."

"Do you want to come with me, pretty boy?
My daughters shall wait on you finely;
My daughters will lead the nightly dance,
And rock and dance and sing you to sleep."

"My father, my father, and don't you see there
The Elfking's daughters in the gloomy place?"
"My son, my son, I see it clearly:
There shimmer the old willows so grey."

"I love you, your beautiful form entices me;
And if you're not willing, then I will use force."
"My father, my father, he's grabbing me now!
The Elfking has done me harm!"

It horrifies the father; he swiftly rides on,
He holds the moaning child in his arms,
Reaches the farm with trouble and hardship;
In his arms, the child was dead. Goethe 'Der Erlkönig'

Page 151: When no buildings were in sight I was back in the Dark Ages. But the moment a farmhouse or a village impuned, I was in the world of Peter Brueghal

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Sep 15, 2011 Geoff rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

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...more 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.(less)

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Jun 03, 2010 Eric rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: art, mitteleuropa, travels, favorites

Ah, these English travellers and their amazing prose--prose equal, fitted to their feats. Virginia Woolf on Hakluyt's Early Voyages:

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 thi

...more

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Feb 15, 2013 Sara rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: england-england, transiti, favorites

Ma solo per un attimo Pareva così strano, adesso che mi stavo sistemando nel piccolo salone - provando, all'improvviso, un senso di desolazione, ma solo per un attimo -, partire dal centro di Londra! Nessuno scoglio a strapiompo, nessun rumore di ciottoli sul bagnasciuga di arnoldiana memoria. Potevo essere diretto a Richmond, o a Gravesend per una zuppa di gamberi e un fritto di pesce, invece che a Bisanzio. [p. 34]

Dicembre Un gong tintinnò e lo steward mi condusse di nuovo nel salone. Ero l'un...more

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Sep 07, 2011 David rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: nyrb, feces

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...more 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?)(less)

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May 20, 2011 Sherwood Smith rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

It 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 th...more

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Dec 09, 2011 Sandy Tjan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, british-literature, autobiography, ebook, wanderlust

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...more

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Dec 07, 2011 Jeremy added it

Shelves: sociological, british-literature

At 18, and freshly kicked out of school, Fermor decided to walk from Holland to Constantinople, bumming around central and eastern Europe, staying anywhere he could and striking up acquaintances with peasants noblemen and everyone in between. It's an almost weepily romantic notion of travel, and it's all compounded by the fact that he did it all in 1933, before WWII would violently wipe away virtually all of the kooky, old Europe. What makes this book so strong is that it doesn't fall into the b...more

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Jul 20, 2008 Ann rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 wan...more

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Aug 15, 2011 Newengland rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: finished-in-2011, nonfiction

"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-waggi...more "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.(less)

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May 06, 2012 Kim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history-and-memoir, non-fiction, travel, mt-tbr-challenge

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 b...more
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. (less)

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Jan 24, 2013 J. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: between-the-wars, europe, period-travel, east-west, balkans

"Östlich von Wien, fängt der Orient an." -Metternich
.. East of Vienna, the Orient begins ..

Off the start-mark at a run, A Time Of Gifts begins as a youthful dash toward freedom and maybe even civilization itself, exiting deliriously from the stuffy attic-rooms of academia. From a gritty mooring by London Bridge, Fermor hitches a ride on a tramp steamer and arrives in the Hook Of Holland, eager to explore one continent right after the next in a headlong rush. Although this is an overland journey,...more "Östlich von Wien, fängt der Orient an." -Metternich
.. East of Vienna, the Orient begins ..

Off the start-mark at a run, A Time Of Gifts begins as a youthful dash toward freedom and maybe even civilization itself, exiting deliriously from the stuffy attic-rooms of academia. From a gritty mooring by London Bridge, Fermor hitches a ride on a tramp steamer and arrives in the Hook Of Holland, eager to explore one continent right after the next in a headlong rush. Although this is an overland journey, it is the rivers and waterways that draw the narrative, from the Lowland canals toward the Rhine and then to the Danube :

Even before I looked at a map, two great rivers had already plotted the itinerary in my mind's eye: the Rhine uncoiled across it, the Alps rose up and then the wolf-harbouring Carpathian watersheds and the cordilleras of the Balkans; and there, at the end of the windings of the Danube, the Black Sea was beginning to spread its mysterious and lopsided shape; and my chief destination was never in a moment's doubt. The levitating skyline of Constantinople ...

Itinerary in hand, Fermor proceeds to track a serpentine and unpredictable path through the northern Europe of 1933. It is an adventure, and both hazard and history are close behind. What's very interesting here is that Fermor is not only learning his fundamentals, in the travel sense and the culture sense, but he's learning to write as he goes. There is a lot of time on the hike, we gather, to develop both themes and organizing principles, creating and editing as he walks. Often the bleak lost-in-blizzard moment is deftly transitioned to the lap-of-luxury moment, by mere chance and good luck, as is customary in this kind of 30's memoir.

Some of the episodic accounts aren't really successful, but come off as charmingly youthful and romantic. The reader is altogether captivated by a cosmopolitan Baron in Slovakia; likewise the brief but ecstatic interlude where our author is adopted by Anna and Lise, age-similar housesitters in Stuttgart, where their absent father's grammophone and vintage wines were included. Sometimes, the unsuccessful moments go without an excuse, though, and the text reads like a long list in a tourism book.

Occasionally, though, the stars align, subject meets interpreter on a level landing, and Fermor goes on perfect, soaring autopilot... as with this passage on Danube School artist Albrecht Altdorfer :

"Here, at the northern most point of the river, a hundred and thirty miles upstream from the Abbey of St. Florian, the ancient stronghold of Ratisbon spans the Danube with a bridge that rivals all the great bridges of the Middle Ages. Those battlements and steeples, wrapped in myth, dominate one of the most complete and convincing mediaeval cities of the world. Anyone who has wandered in these streets can understand why the holy pastorals which his colleagues turned into dialect folk-tales, shift, under his hand, into the mood and the scenery of legends. The episodes of scripture—which are nowhere more splendidly manifest than in his great altarpiece at St. Florian’s—are suddenly clothed in the magic and the glamour of fairy stories; fairy stories, moreover, where the Mantua-Antwerp axis, uncoiling brilliant strands into the fabric, has been most potently spinning. Under the gothic interlock of cold whites and greys that canopy hallowed scenes in Flanders, the Biblical characters, clad in robes of lilac and mulberry and lemon and the shrill sulphur hue Mantegna loved, evolve and posture with convincing Renaissance splendor. Pontius Pilate—velvet-clad, mantled in dark sapphire, tasseled and collared like an Elector and turbanned like a Caliph—twists his sprinkled hands between ewer and salver under a magnificent baldaquin of scumbled gold. Through the lancets and the cinquefoils and beyond the diamond panes, the fluted rocks ascend and the woods and cliffs and cloud-banks of Gethsemane frame a luminous and incandescent sunset that presages Patinir. Though the centurions are knights in dark armour, no mortal smith ever wrought those helmet-wings and metal flourishes and knee-flutes and elbow-fans, even on the anvils of Augsburg and Milan in Maximilian’s reign. It is the fabulous harness that flashed later on every pre-raphaelite Grail-seeker and greaved and gauntleted the paladins in the Coloured Fairy books. Shifting from Divinity to sacred fable, the same ambience of magic isolates lonely knights among millions of leaves and confronts St. Eustace and the stag with its antlered crucifix, in a forest full of hazards and spells."

This is a young writer still learning his craft, but Place and Time have conspired to give us a near-perfect piece of Period Travel in this book; this one leaves off at Hungary, so much more from this ambitious road trip still to come. (less)

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Mar 29, 2013 Andrew Sanger rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favourite-travel-books

This account of a journey on foot across central Europe, undertaken in the middle of winter by an 18-year-old 'posh kid' with no sensible plan and no objective except to walk to Constantinople [ie Istanbul], is surely one of the most glorious and accomplished pieces of descriptive writing ever published. The year is 1933, and the drum of Nazism is already sounding across much of the territory he covers. But for the most part, the Europe he sees is astonishingly rustic and seems almost medieval....more

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Nov 15, 2012 Miike rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The simple concept of this journey was to walk from the hook of Holland to Istanbul following the two main arteries of Europe: the Rhine and the Danube. The book was written from pre-war notebooks so some of the language is slightly unfamiliar at first. Once you get over your modern cynicism the gentle pace and detailed descriptions will pull you through the slowly changing landscape of Europe. You will feel the cold of blizzards through dense woodlands and then warm up to drink schnapps in a Ba...more

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Aug 26, 2012 Roger rated it 5 of 5 stars

At the tender age of 18, Patrick Fermor left his native England to embark on an epic journey - to walk from the North-Eastern tip of Europe to it's end at the Straits of Bosphorus. The book under review here is the first of a proposed trilogy describing that trip (the second, Between the woods and the water is available - and no doubt will be reviewed here in due course - while the third, describing the end of his journey, was almost complete at the time of the author's death. Publication of the...more At the tender age of 18, Patrick Fermor left his native England to embark on an epic journey - to walk from the North-Eastern tip of Europe to it's end at the Straits of Bosphorus. The book under review here is the first of a proposed trilogy describing that trip (the second, Between the woods and the water is available - and no doubt will be reviewed here in due course - while the third, describing the end of his journey, was almost complete at the time of the author's death. Publication of the third volume is mooted for 2012).

Fermor must have been quite a precocious lad to think of undertaking the journey; and a romantic lad too, with visions of sleeping in haystacks and mixing with peasants. As it turned out, he only slept in the open once in the more than three months of tramping that this book covers, and that particular night ended in him being rounded up at gunpoint by the Czech border police.

By that time he had travelled over 1500 miles, nearly all on foot, with occasional journeys by train, truck and barge. He had spent time with tramps, university students and more than one member of the aristocracy, stayed in hotels, vagrants hostels and castles, and was slowly educating himself about Europe, history, and languages.

Fermor had the luck of connecting with the right people (at that time just being English seemed enough to grant entree anywhere, even in Germany), and is befriended by all and sundry, who provide him not only with shelter and food, but history and culture. Where the beginning of the book is about the joy of being on the open road and finding himself free, by the time he crosses the bridge over the Danube into Hungary (the final act of this volume), he is ruminating on the twists and turns of history in Europe and England, the wonders of architecture, and fine wines and cigars.

Fermor did not begin writing this book until well into adulthood, after heroic wartime service earned him the DSO (the story of which can be found in Ill met by moonlight), and he had sucessfully published two books of his later travels in Greece - Mani - Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, and Roumeli.

This accounts for the overall elegaic tone of the book: that of an older man looking back on a great adventure in his youth, in a time before he was corrupted and dragged down by adult life. The tone is heightened by his description of a Europe before the depredations of World War II; when aristocrats still lived in castles, and before Nazism cast a pall over the continent. Fermor's journey was undertaken in 1934, so his descriptions of the first rumblings of the Nazi scourge are a chill premonition of what was to come. Fermor made the most of the advantage of writing much later to occasionally discuss the future of some of the people he met and stayed with - not all of it good reading.

What sets this book apart as a work of literature, rather than merely a travel book or a memoir, is the craft and style with which it is written. There is never a lapse in tone - that of a wise and erudite adult looking back at his developing self, marvelling at what he saw and did, and noting events that turned out to be pivotal or formative for his later years. The descriptive passages are all immaculate - whether of a snow-bound German village, the abbey at Melk, or the city of Prague. These descriptions are all different, and are all as the older Fermor might remember them - Prague becomes a jumble of competing images, Melk an almost overwhelming history and art lesson, while other 'simpler' pleasures, such as watching the sun set over the Danube, acquire a gilded feeling of a moment captured in time, which the author felt as strongly at the time of writing as he did as a young man out in the wilds.

If you love fine writing, you must read this book. If you love European history, you must read this book. If you love armchair travel, you must read this book.(less)

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Jul 07, 2012 Sueij rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club, did-not-finish

I absolutely do not understand how this book has such a good rating here and on Amazon -- and my entire book club of 12 avid readers agrees, so it's not just me.

This seemed like such a great idea: a coming-of-age story, travel, Germany between the two World Wars. How much cooler could a book get? The author led a fascinating life, wrote a ton of books, and the books are well-rated. We thought this was a sure-fire winner.

Only two of 12 people finished it, one because she's the one who recommended...more

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Apr 25, 2012 L Fleisig rated it 5 of 5 stars

"Pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find."

The opening line of William Wordsworth's "Stray Pleasures" captures accurately Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time of Gifts". Fermor's story of his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople is filled with tales of the stray gifts he found along the way. Fermor's story, one that was an absolute treat to come upon and read, was a gift to this reader.

Fermor was a child of what could be called the British colon...more "Pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find."

The opening line of William Wordsworth's "Stray Pleasures" captures accurately Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time of Gifts". Fermor's story of his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople is filled with tales of the stray gifts he found along the way. Fermor's story, one that was an absolute treat to come upon and read, was a gift to this reader.

Fermor was a child of what could be called the British colonial diaspora. Born in London in 1915, Fermor's mother left Patrick in England while she went to join her husband, a geologist, in India. Patrick was left to board with another family and, when old enough, was packed off to a series of boarding schools. Perhaps not surprisingly, Fermor's childhood was marked by a series of schoolboy rebellions and just shy of his 18th birthday found himself expelled from his school. With nothing much to do he decided to take a ferry from England to the Hook of Holland and from there to proceed on foot across Europe until he reached Constantinople. He left England in December 1933.

"A Time of Gifts" covers Fermor's travels from England to the Danube River. Partly a recreation from the journals he kept during his walk (his earlier journals were lost early on in his trip) and from memory when he set down to write of his travels in the 1970s, "A Time of Gifts" is a remarkable piece of writing. As the reader walks along with Fermor he/she is treated not just to description of Europe as seen from ground-level but of a Europe and its people that would soon be transfigured in another world war. This is a study in time and of place and is captured in prose that captured me from the start.

It is hard in a brief review to capture the flavor of Fermor's writings but I am hopeful one example will entice the prospective readers. After finding an Inn in a town busy celebrating Hitler's ascension to the Chancellery of the Germany, Fermor is touched and transformed by the folk music he heard sung in that tavern:
--
Later on the volume dwindled and the thumping died away as the singing became softer and harmonies and descants began to weave more complex patterns. Germany has a rich anthology of regional songs, and these, I think were dreamy celebrations of the forests and plains of Westphalia, long sighs of homesickness musically transposed. It was charming. And the charm made it impossible, at the moment, to connect the singers with organized bullying and the smashing of Jewish shop windows and nocturnal bonfires of books.
--

Fermor's journey is filled with interesting detours and diversions and those just added to the pleasure. He seemed to have a gift for languages (as his later career as an undercover operative during WWII evidences), a gift for people as he managed to always find some way to befriend and be befriended by people he met along the way, and a gift for telling a story. "A Time of Gifts" is an apt title indeed.

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Jan 08, 2012 Steve rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: travel, europe, favourites

A Time of Gifts is a travel book by travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. Published in 1977, it is actually based on travels in 1933-34. When the author was just 18 in 1933, he decided to walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople (now Istanbul), a journey of more than a thousand miles. This book, the first in what was intended to be a trilogy, covers his journey as far as Hungary. It is based partly on recollections, and partly on a notebook which he rediscovered many decades later in a castle somewhe...more A Time of Gifts is a travel book by travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. Published in 1977, it is actually based on travels in 1933-34. When the author was just 18 in 1933, he decided to walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople (now Istanbul), a journey of more than a thousand miles. This book, the first in what was intended to be a trilogy, covers his journey as far as Hungary. It is based partly on recollections, and partly on a notebook which he rediscovered many decades later in a castle somewhere on his route![return][return]The book is not overly thick, weighing in at almost exactly 300 pages, but the type is small and a lot of words are packed onto each page so it isn't a particularly quick read. Leigh Fermor is a master of the English language, and the book has many lengthy and beautiful descriptions in. It is at its heart a travel book, but covers quite a bit of history as well as art, literature and various other topics.[return][return]The book is regarded by many as one of the finest travel books written in the English language, Leigh Fermor is a highly regarded writer and this is considered his masterpiece. So what is it actually like to read?[return][return]The book starts off with a lengthy letter to a former colleague from WW2, which serves as the book's introduction. I skipped past this at first, eager to get started with the book, but came back to it when I was part way through and found it full of useful backplot and biographical detail. I found the book overall a joy to read, it gives a wonderful view of pre-second world war Europe, painting a picture of a world long gone. Much of the book is beautifully written. The author does use a lot of long words and bits of German and other languages (mostly though not always with translations), as well as references to literature and art which I wasn't familiar with. My advice is just enjoy the book, and don't get bogged down in the sections where he is discussing a (now obscure) old literary text, or an old historical-political situation which has long since evapourated. Just enjoy the book for what it is, a wonderful travelogue.[return][return]I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone, as it is not an easy read and written in an old fashioned style (i.e. nothing like Bill Bryson). But I loved it. I can't wait to read more books by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and it has got me into travel books generally too.(less)

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Dec 14, 2011 Ruth rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

c1977. A lyrical read, indeed despite some very engineered sentences. But what a time this must have been. What struck me was that in the pre-war years, the words "English" and "student" when juxtaposed together was almost a passport for hospitality and, dare I say it, respect. How times have changed - I doubt that either of those 2 words, especially when put together, holds true in Europe any more. Such a pity! I do not think that those "innocent" times will ever come around again and certainly...more

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Nov 30, 2011 Margaret Mary rated it 4 of 5 stars

A travelogue written in the late 30's by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Basically, he didn't fit into the traditional British school system so he decided to take some time off and travel to Constantinople, mostly by foot. I sent this piece to Jen because I could picture her in the situation somewhat. (He's just walked into a tavern somewhere in Germany.)

With freezing cheeks and hair caked with snow, I clumped into an entrancing haven of oak beams and carving and alcoves and changing floor levels. A jungl...more A travelogue written in the late 30's by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Basically, he didn't fit into the traditional British school system so he decided to take some time off and travel to Constantinople, mostly by foot. I sent this piece to Jen because I could picture her in the situation somewhat. (He's just walked into a tavern somewhere in Germany.)

With freezing cheeks and hair caked with snow, I clumped into an entrancing haven of oak beams and carving and alcoves and changing floor levels. A jungle of impedimenta encrusted the interior - mugs and bottles and glasses and antlers - the innocent accumulation of years, not stage props of forced conviviality - and the whole place glowed with a universal patina. It was more like a room in a castle and, except for a cat asleep in from of the stove, quite empty. This was the moment I longed for every day. Settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling, with wine, bread, and cheese handy and with my papers, books and diary all laid out: writing up the day's doings, hunting for words in the dictionary, drawing, struggling with verses, or merely subsiding in a vacuous and contented trance while the snow thawed off my boots.

And of course, the story ends (or begins) with the kind, intelligent, and generous owners basically adopting him for a couple days which leads to another social connection that allows him to stay in a local castle after that.

It's a fun book, and the fact that all these travels took place before WWII is kind of poignant at times. After he was in one city in Belgium for only a night, he wrote that the entire city except for the cathedral was leveled two years later. "If' I'd known, I would have stayed longer."

Actually, it's quite the indictment of American education, or modern education, or maybe just my education. Today, this guy would've been medicated and in a special ed class. He went on this trip because he knew he couldn't pass the exams to get into the British equivalent of higher education, but travelling through the Netherlands he recognized everything because of the hundreds of hours he spent in art museums and the Dutch Masters had captured it so well. He seems to know history of every region and town he stops in and can chat easily about classical literature, philosophy, etc. with his various hosts. He has an impressive vocabulary and writes in an engaging way. I, on the other hand, had to look at an atlas to see that, yes indeed, the Rhine does connect the Netherlands to Germany. Disgusting!(less)

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Nov 26, 2011 Alex V. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Patrick Fermor possesses in this text a conversational way with history that I openly envy. He can talk about the first Apostlic King of Christian Hungary as easily and normally as we might allude to so-and-so from the office. Plus , I am a sucker for any book where someone walks from one place to a distant other - in the is case, from Holland to the Danube; this book details the first half of a trek to Constantinople at the eve of World War II. He captures the all-encompassing hallucinatory int...more

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Oct 04, 2011 Christoph Rehage rated it 5 of 5 stars

Does this one need an introduction?

Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor
Title: A Time of Gifts / Between the Woods and the Water
Time: 1933-34
Destination: from Amsterdam to the Iron Gates
Length: 2 years
Type: walking
Rating: 10/10
A youthful old man

The story: PLF is only eighteen years old when he decides to take a walk through Europe – all the way from Amsterdam to Constantinople (Istanbul). He walks for one year, picks up languages, talks to locals, learns about history, and keeps a meticulous diary. And t...more

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Sep 13, 2011 Jim O'Donnell rated it 5 of 5 stars

At the same time that Byron was travelling across Central Asia, 18-year old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out from the Hook of Holland and walked all the way to Constantinople. This book takes him to the middle Danube. The second volume in the series, “Between the Woods and the Water” didn’t appear until 1986. The final installment has never shown up. Fermor died just this past June at the ripe old age of 96.

And yes, this is the Fermor who, ten years later, parachuted into Crete, disguised himself a...more

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Jul 16, 2011 Colleen Clark rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, memoir, travel, ww-ii

Wonderful, spell-binding.

Just before Christmas 1933 the 18 year old Patrick Leigh Fermor, expelled from his school in England, decided to embark on a walk across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (already known in the Republic of Turkey by its Turkish name, Istanbul (and not the capital!). Basically, Leigh Fermor walked up the Rhine, which empties into the North Sea at Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Itinerary - Dordrecht, (missed Aachen not knowing it was Aix-la-Chapelle, where Cha...more Wonderful, spell-binding.

Just before Christmas 1933 the 18 year old Patrick Leigh Fermor, expelled from his school in England, decided to embark on a walk across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (already known in the Republic of Turkey by its Turkish name, Istanbul (and not the capital!). Basically, Leigh Fermor walked up the Rhine, which empties into the North Sea at Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Itinerary - Dordrecht, (missed Aachen not knowing it was Aix-la-Chapelle, where Charlemagne was crowned in 800), Cologne, Andernach, C(K)oblenz,Mainz, Worms, Mannheim, Heidelberg (not on the Rhine)...Stuttgart,Ulm. Then Augsburg and Munich. Detailed descriptions of architecture and history. How much of the rich historical knowledge Leigh Fermor displays on nearly every page he already knew at 19 and how much might have been added later -text not published until 1977 - perhaps hardly matters. When he left England he already knew Latin, Greek and French, and by the time he got to Munich in January he was learning a lot of German. It's what happens when you have to fend for yourself and sleep in the houses and bars etc of strangers. He also had almost no money. In Munich he gets his first infusion of 4 pounds.

p 50, this edition. from Cologne. "It had occurred to me that I might learn German quicker by reading Shakespeare in the famous German translation....so I bought "Hamlet, Prinz von Danemark, in a paperbound pocket edition." Later he meets a man in Vienna who learned English by reading Shakespeare in the original.

His narrative also includes references to the beginning of Nazism. Hitler came to power in Jan. 1933. There was an ominous air, and of course, knowing what was just about to happen, by the time he wrote the book more than 30 years later. Leigh Fermor reminds us, through the end of the 2nd book, how much was about to change and that the world he traveled through and described in such detail was soon to disappear; in many cases utterly destroyed.

This first book starts out in the dead of winter. He finally crosses from Slovakia into Hungary on the day before Easter, 1934. In Vienna he had picked up the Danube and follows it downstream, ultimately to the Black Sea. He spent some time in Bratislava and made a side trip to Prague.

Although some of the writing may be informed by history he learned later, his level of erudition is just astonishing. He didn't have any books of poetry with him, but he entertained himself as he walked by reciting -"....a great deal of Shakespeare....Several Marlowe speeches followed and stretches of Spenser...most of Keats's odes...." etc etc ( p83-4, my edition) Also some French poetry and a lot of Latin.

Leigh Fermor translates all the German (which I happen to know) but none of the Latin or French. Another edition might correct this for the linguistically limited reader. Maps would be good too. I kept getting out my atlases but, at the very least, a general map of his itinerary with identifiable dates would help.
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Jun 16, 2011 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: travel-adventure, mitteleuropa

The London Telegraph commented of Patrick Leigh Fermor that: "His most celebrated book told the story of his year-long walk across Europe from Rotterdam to Istanbul in 1934, when he was 18 and the Continent was on the verge of cataclysmic change. His account of his adventures was projected as a trilogy, of which only the first two parts have so far been published, A Time of Gifts in 1977 and Between the Woods and the Water nine years later.
The journey was a cultural awakening for Leigh Fermor th...more

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Jul 22, 2010 Denis rated it 5 of 5 stars

This travel book may be one of the most beautifully written books in the English language. Patrick Leigh Fermor's prose is stunning, it flows like a hypnotic river, it mesmerizes, it shines, sentence after sentence. But there's much more to this wonderful non-fiction book than just exquisite writing: by retelling the journey that he undertook as a very young British man, in the thirties, and which brought him to Holland, Germany, Austria, and the next door Eastern-European countries, P.L.F. brin...more

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Sep 02, 2009 Kate rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: travel-lit

When the author set out at the age of 18, he had just been thrown out of an English boarding school for having a relationship with a townie. But he won’t conform to your idea of a high-school drop-out. He gets himself a passport, takes a boat to the Hoek van Holland, and then proceeds to walk from Holland to Constantinople. This first leg of his journey covers the first volume in the trilogy. I had decided to read it on the occasion of my own journey from Holland to deep in Germany. Whereas Patr...more When the author set out at the age of 18, he had just been thrown out of an English boarding school for having a relationship with a townie. But he won’t conform to your idea of a high-school drop-out. He gets himself a passport, takes a boat to the Hoek van Holland, and then proceeds to walk from Holland to Constantinople. This first leg of his journey covers the first volume in the trilogy. I had decided to read it on the occasion of my own journey from Holland to deep in Germany. Whereas Patrick walked, I took the Deutsche Bahn. I read 7/8 of it before I left it on a train to Düsseldorf and am longing to read the end and will have to get another copy at Daunt Books when I return to London. Whereas I was traveling in the depths of summer, Patrick began his journey at the beginning of winter. Spending nights sleeping on straw and sometimes in unheated barns, he remains plucky and entertains himself by theorizing the nature of ornament and reciting Latin poetry and monologues from Shakespeare.

He has an agile mind and manages to pick up German, as if by linguistic osmosis, within a few days of wandering through the landscapes and villages. In Munich he looks up an anglophile baron, who not only puts him up, but introduces him around, feeds and entertains him. The Baron finds a willing object for his noblesse obligé in the young and tramping Patrick, and even writes to all his castle-owning friends from Munich to the Danube, who subsequently feed and entertain the pilgrim. It’s like a pre-internet high-end couchsurfing.com.

My favorite part of the book takes place in Vienna, where the author settles in for a few weeks with a new acquaintance, the lugubrious Frisian Konrad, who learned English by memorizing Shakespeare. The two go door-to-door in Vienna to draw portraits of the upper-middle-class Viennese, which opens to them strange worlds of interbellum domesticity, handlebar mustaches, plates of pastries, and occasional decadence. What a disappointment Bratislava is, so close to Vienna, but seething squalor.

If you find my book in Düsseldorf, mail it to me so I can finish my review!
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About Patrick Leigh Fermor

Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE was a British author, scholar and soldier, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".

At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He set off on 8 December 1933, after Hitler ha...more Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE was a British author, scholar and soldier, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".

At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He set off on 8 December 1933, after Hitler had recently come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also in the country houses of Central Europe with the landed gentry and aristocracy. Along the journey, he listened to the many stories and dialects he came across. Two of his subsequent travel books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, detail this journey. Written decades later, they benefit from his scholarly learning, giving a wealth of historical, geographical, linguistic and anthropological information as the narrative proceeds. A planned third volume, intended to follow the journey to its completion in Constantinople, has not yet appeared. Leigh Fermor arrived in Constantinople on 1 January 1935, then continued on to travel around Greece. In March, he was involved in the campaign of royalist forces in Macedonia against an attempted Republican revolt. He was fascinated by Greece and its language. In Athens, he met Balasha Cantacuzène (Bălaşa Cantacuzino), a Romanian noblewoman, with whom he fell in love. They shared an old watermill outside the city looking out towards Poros, where she painted and he wrote. They moved on to Băleni, the Cantacuzène house in Moldavia, where they were living when World War II was declared.

Leigh Fermor joined the Irish Guards, but due to his knowledge of Greek he was commissioned in the General List and became a liaison officer in Albania. He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute. He was one of a small number of Special Operations Executive officers posted to organise the island's resistance to German occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains and led the party that captured and evacuated the German Commander, General Heinrich Kreipe, in 1944. The episode was immortalised in the book and later film, Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Leigh Fermor was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde. He was awarded the DSO, was made Honorary Citizen of Heraklion and later of Kardamyli and Gytheio. The National Archives in London holds copies of Leigh Fermor's wartime dispatches from occupied Crete, in file number HS 5/728.
In 2005, a documentary film on the Cretan resistance movement entitled The 11th Day was released. The documentary, produced by filmmakers Christos and Michael Epperson, contains extensive interview segments with Leigh Fermor, filmed in 2003. He recounts in great detail his service in the S.O.E. and his activities on Crete, including the capture of General Kreipe.

In 1950, Leigh Fermor's first book, The Traveller's Tree, was published about his post-war travels in the Caribbean. The book won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature and established his career path. He went on to write several further books of his journeys, including Mani and Roumeli of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece. Many critics and discerning readers regard his 1977 A Time of Gifts as one of the greatest travel books in the English language. He translated the manuscript, The Cretan Runner, written by his former subordinate on Crete during the war, the dispatch runner George Psychoundakis, and had it published. He also wrote a novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, which was adapted and set to music as an opera by the composer Malcolm Williamson.
Leigh Fermor's extraordinary charm and gift for bridging the cultural divide between the Uni(less)

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Quotes from A Time of Gifts

“I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches.” — 8 people liked it

“All horsepower corrupts.” — 4 people liked it

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A Time of Gifts (Trilogy #1)

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