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A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (New York Review Books Classics)
This beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written.
At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey-to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor's book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed-through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube.
At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.
At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey-to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor's book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed-through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube.
At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come.
Editorial Reviews
"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
"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 engaging 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 de...
"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
"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 engaging 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 de...
Readers Top Reviews
Skippo
I finished the book with huge admire for the author. Leigh Fermor must have been quite a man. Plenty of guts, charm and resilience. A vast, amazing knowledge of history, literature, architecture and pretty good language skills to boot. But the book! Parts of it were fascinating, especially- for me - the descriptions of people and the adventures he had along his journey. I was often intrigued too to learn fragments of European history. However, the language is so very overwrought and the vocabulary so recherche that I began to skip over page after page. Descriptions of castles, churches and monasteries were so overblown and so verbose as to drown any interest in….a torrent of words. Not simple words either: it feels as though the book was written with a pen in one hand and a dictionary in the other. And a game was being played: how many long and obscure words can I get on this page? A story of a fantastic achievement, but the writer needed a few weeks as a Mirror journalist so that the story could be made plain.
Waterman
I happened across the name Patrick Leigh Fermor one day recently and did a search on him to reveal perhaps the most interesting and accomplished man since Marco Polo. Marco became an emissary in several Eastern lands for Kublai Khan. He set out to found the Silk Road at the age of 17, a year younger than PLF. Amazingly Patrick was able to recount, some fifty years later, with the help of some notebooks his entire walking trip as far as the bridge into Hungary I loved the fact that he bought most of his meagre equipment from a Government surplus store in 1933. Interesting to note to that in those days one could take a ferry from Tower Bridge to Hook of Holland.Few writers have regaled us with so much glorious descriptive detail of a daily trek. Sleeping rough, in haystacks or whatever and getting lucky with more superior accommodation in grand houses and castles, and being given introductions to householders in the next village or town along the Danube. The writer had a classical mind and sometimes lost me but it was his interests in almost everything that I admired most. A wonderful read and I look forward to the sequel Between the Woods and the Water, from Hungary onwards. What an extraordinary travelogue indeed!
Clif BensonNeasa Mac
The Author was undoubtedly a hero, adventurer and polyglot, but he seems to think all of his readers would also be able to understand French, Latin and German, not to mention a lot of archaic English. I guess in his learned eyes I might be viewed as a bit of a prole, but I usually manage the likes of Burgess, Graham Green and Waugh so am not entirely stuck in the comic book end of literature. Eric Newby is more my idea of bedtime travel writing. His eulogizing over different architectural features may well have a great degree of scholarly knowledge of the subject but I can only imagine such fulsome descriptiveness, page after page of it, will be lost on all but the most erudite of architectural professionals, or constructors of the more arcane features of medieval fortifications. I found myself skimming through too much of his undecipherable prose, feeling shortchanged. It seems to be and have the strong flavour of embellished reminiscence (aided by some diary extracts) of an older, wiser sage, than the teenager who marched out in his hob nailed boots into a Europe about to disintegrate into fascism and war. On the bonus side the few references to Brown shirts, the SA, Sturmabteilung and other vermin in the streets and beer halls are sometimes quite revealing as to the prewar atmosphere pervading in Germany/Austria.. None the less the more academic/aristocratic acquaintances that seemed to be his main contacts appeared to be above such mundane matters, living in a detached Belle Epoch seemingly untouched by the hyperinflation or chaos of the Weimar Republic. The narrative ends abruptly before reaching the Balkans and Turkey, again leaving me feeling a bit shortchanged. I wouldn't have wanted to have not read this book (parts). There are some really nice passages and the author comes over as at least likable, but neither would i give it an unconditional recommendation. And so sadly only three stars from me!
Book Bonkers
Early on in this book, Patrick Leigh Fermor says that 'a single year contains a hundred avatars'. His comment sets off a long trek, meandering through Holland and Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bohemia and Moravia en route to Constantinople. As a young man in his late teens, at the birth of National Socialism, PLF is aware of the 'protective illusion' that makes him feel he will always be welcome, so there he is and there he goes, protected, fed and watered by well-to-do barons and eccentric scholars, a polymathic memoirist with his eclectic finger in pies across the spectrum of the Humanities. The combination of sinewy intellect and emotional fervour is always in flood, never more so, he says, than when 'settling at a heavy inn-table, thawing and tingling with wine, bread and cheese handy and my papers, books and diary all laid out.' It's pretty frugal fare, though from his diaries, written up over forty years after the original experience, lava flows of words swamp the reader in a 'staunchless' (PLF loves the word) flux of often over-embroidered detail. Barring the woodworm, the roof of St.Vitus's Cathedral is given a full scholarly scour, with 'diapered soffits among the sanctuary lamps of the chantry' or 'the threatened anticlimax of a flattened ogee'. Excellent or exhibitionist? Either way, this book will grow on a second and third reading. The gap between erudite and arcane becomes very narrow, though there are some homely touches, as when the writer describes columns as 'grooved like celery stalks'. His 'douceur de vivre' he says, 'pervades the whole of life' , but the reader feels excluded from the opulence of his genius too often. The sheer tedium of some of the architectural feature-spotting, pages and pages of it at times, may well wear you down, but the putteed ruggedness of this Byzantium-bound Odysseus wins the day. With Hitler beginning to emerge from the feculent bog of fascism, the placid rationality of this charming young genius holds you fast to his footsteps wherever he goes. This is not an easy read, especially in the absence of maps, but there's a sincere, authentic and rawly naïve voice here, striding ever onward. The descriptions of his walks over the surreal, Breughel-like winter landscapes are compelling. Hang in there, however laborious it seems, for there's always a deep slumber in the hay barn waiting for you at the close of day.
John P. Jones III
Patrick Leigh Fermor updated Lord Acton's famous dictum by placing a "horse" in front of "corrupts." And it seemed to be an axiom that served him well, though he was not such a purist that he did not occasionally resort to mechanized transport, including barges, trains and trucks. At age 18 he did what he set out to do, rather impulsively it seemed, since he even eschewed the prospects of good weather: in December, 1933, he set off to walk from the coast of Holland to Constantinople, as it was called then. He didn't return to England until January, 1937. This work covers roughly the first half of his journey, to a bridge over the Danube River where he was to enter Hungary, in the spring of 1934.
