Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was an intrepid traveler, a
heroic soldier, and a writer with a unique prose style. After his
stormy schooldays, followed by the walk across Europe to
Constantinople that begins in A Time of Gifts (1977) and continues
through Between the Woods and the Water (1986), he lived and
traveled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago. His books Mani
(1958) and Roumeli (1966) attest to his deep interest in languages
and remote places. In the Second World War he joined the Irish
Guards, became a liaison officer in Albania, and fought in Greece
and Crete. He was awarded the DSO and OBE. He lived partly in
Greece—in the house he designed with his wife, Joan, in an olive
grove in the Mani—and partly in Worcestershire. He was knighted in
2004 for his services to literature and to British–Greek
relations.
Jan Morris was born in 1926, is Anglo-Welsh, and lives in
Wales. She has written some forty books, including the Pax
Britannica trilogy about the British Empire; studies of Wales,
Spain, Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Trieste;
six volumes of collected travel essays; two memoirs; two capricious
biographies; and a couple of novels—but she defines her entire
oeuvre as “disguised autobiography.” She is an honorary D.Litt. of
the University of Wales and a Commander of the British Empire. Her
memoir Conundrum is available as a New York Review Book Classic.
"Those for whom Paddy’s prose is still an undiscovered country are
to be envied for what lies ahead-hours with one of the most buoyant
and curious personalities one can find in English." — The New York
Sun
"Mr. Fermor…is a peerless companion, unbound by timetable or
convention, relentless in his high spirits and curiosity." —
Richard B. Woodward, The New York Times
"We are aware at every step that his adventure can never be
duplicated: only this extraordinary person at this pivotal time
could have experienced and recorded many of these sights. Distant
lightening from events in Germany weirdly illuminates the trail of
this free spirit." — The New York Times
"The young Fermor appears to have been as delightful a traveling
companion as the much older Fermor a raconteur." — The Houston
Chronicle
"[A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water] are absolutely
delightful volumes, both for those who want to better understand
what was lost in the violence of Europe’s 20th-century divisions
and for those who appreciate the beauty and thrill of travel
writing at its best." — The Houston Chronicle
"Leigh Fermor is recognizably that figure many writers of the past
century have yearned to be, the man of action." — The Guardian
"He was, and remains, an Englishman, with so much living to his
credit that the lives conducted by the rest of us seem barely
sentient-pinched and paltry things, laughably provincial in their
scope, and no more fruitful than sleepwalks. We fret about our
kids’ S.A.T. scores, whereas this man, when he was barely more than
a kid himself, shouldered a rucksack and walked from Rotterdam to
Istanbul." — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
“Even more magical...through Hungary, its lost province of
Transylvania, and into Romania...sampling the tail end of a
languid, urbane and anglophile way of life that would soon be swept
away forever.” —Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review
“In these two volumes of extraordinary lyrical beauty and
discursive, staggering erudition, Leigh Fermor recounted his first
great excursion... They’re partially about an older author’s
encounter with his young self, but they’re mostly an evocation of a
lost Mitteleuropa of wild horses and dark forests, of ancient
synagogues and vivacious Jewish coffeehouses, of Hussars and
Uhlans, and of high-spirited and deeply eccentric patricians with
vast libraries (such as the Transylvanian count who was a famous
entomologist specializing in Far Eastern moths and who spoke
perfect English, though with a heavy Scottish accent, thanks to his
Highland nanny). These books amply display Leigh Fermor’s keen eye
and preternatural ear for languages, but what sets them apart,
besides the utterly engagin persona of their narrator, is his
historical imagination and intricate sense of historical linkage...
Few writers are as alive to the persistence of the past (he’s ever
alert to the historical forces that account for the shifts in
custom, language, architecture, and costume that he discerns), and
I’ve read none who are so sensitive to the layers of invasion that
define the part of Europe he depicts here. The unusual vantage
point of these books lends them great pregnancy, for we and the
author know what the youthful Leigh Fermor cannot: that the war
will tear the scenery and shatter the buildings he evokes; that
German and Soviet occupation will uproot the beguiling world of
those Tolstoyan nobles; and that in fact very few people who became
his friends on this marvelous and sunny journey will survive the
coming catastrophe.” -- Benjamin Schwartz, The Atlantic
"This is a glorious feast, the account of a walk in 1934 from the
Hook of Holland to what was then Constantinople. The 18-year-old
Fermor began by sleeping in barns but, after meeting some
landowners early on, got occasional introductions to castles. So he
experienced life from both sides, and with all the senses,
absorbing everything: flora and fauna, art and architecture,
geography, clothing, music, foods, religions, languages. Writing
the book decades after the fact, in a baroque style that is always
rigorous, never flowery, he was able to inject historical depth
while still retaining the feeling of boyish enthusiasm and
boundless curiosity. This is the first of a still uncompleted
trilogy; the second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, takes
him through Hungary and Romania; together they capture better than
any books I know the remedial, intoxicating joy of travel." —
Thomas Swick, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
“Recovers the innocence and the excitement of youth, when
everything was possible and the world seemed luminescent with
promise. ...Even more magical...through Hungary, its lost province
of Transylvania, and into Romania... sampling the tail end of a
languid, urbane and anglophile way of life that would soon be swept
away forever.” —Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review
“A book so good you resent finishing it.” —Norman Stone
"The greatest of living travel writers…an amazingly complex and
subtle evocation of a place that is no more." — Jan Morris
Praise for Patrick Leigh Fermor:
"One of the greatest travel writers of all time”–The Sunday
Times
“A unique mixture of hero, historian, traveler and writer; the last
and the greatest of a generation whose like we won't see
again.”–Geographical
“The finest traveling companion we could ever have . . . His head
is stocked with enough cultural lore and poetic fancy to make every
league an adventure.” –Evening Standard
If all Europe were laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than
attempt to recreate it, or at least to preserve some sense of
historical splendor and variety, by immersing oneself in the travel
books of Patrick Leigh Fermor.”—Ben Downing, The Paris Review
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