Books
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
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A Time of Gifts |
In 1932, aged 18, the author of this masterpiece packed a rucksack and with little money set off alone from London for Constantinople. Thirty years later he describes the first part of his journey through Holland, Germany, Austria to Hungary. Much of this is on foot with nights in everything from barns to castles. Wonderful descriptions of town and countryside and accounts of the warm welcome and hospitality he received from the locals.
(Jeremy Swann - bwl 20 September 2003) |
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A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water |
The author, the distinguished travel writer, Graecophile and WW II hero, set out in 1933, when he was eighteen, to walk to Constantinople with nothing more than he could carry in his haversack. He describes the people he met en route as he followed the Rhine and the Danube, sleeping in barns and fairy-tale castles. By the end of the first book he has reached Hungary. In the second he continues across the Hungarian plain and the marches of Transylvania towards his ultimate goal, brilliantly describing the people and the countryside as well as eruditely reflecting on the history of this romantic region. Both books are a feast. All that is lacking now is a third volume to complete the story.
(Jeremy Swann - bwl 33 February 2006) |
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The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos |
Was it worth the wait? Maybe. In the weeks before his death in 2011, PLF was still working on the draft of the third and last volume of his trilogy describing his epic journey from London to Constantinople in 1932 (bwl 33). It doesn't have the magic or the charm of the earlier two, nor disappointingly does he write about arriving at his destination. Instead, the last third of the book is devoted to an uneventful excursion to Mount Athos.
(Jeremy Miller - bwl 87 Winter 2018) |
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The Violins of Saint Jacques |
On a Greek island, a 1950s English traveller meets an elderly resident Frenchwoman. She tells him the story of her youth on a Caribbean island, Saint Jacques. This dazzlingly tale of an exotic and decadent society of French aristocrats and 'natives' ends with the catastrophe that befalls the island during the annual Mardi Gras ball. The world the narrator knew is brought to an abrupt end, leaving us to bewail its loss.
(Wendy Swann - bwl 25 August 2004) |
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