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Trilogy #2
Between The Woods And The Water: On Foot to Constantinople - The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates
The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary. Picking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania. The trip was an exploration of a continent which was already showing signs of the holocaust which was to come. Although frequently praised for his lyrical writing, Fermor's account also provides a coherent understanding of the dramatic events then unfolding in Middle Europe. But the delight remains, 20 years after first publication, in travelling with him in his picaresque journey past remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges.
287 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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About the author
Patrick Leigh Fermor
54 books581 followersSir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, OBE, DSO was of English and Irish descent. After his stormy schooldays, followed by his walk across Europe to Constantinople, he lived and travelled in the Balkans and the Greek Archipelago acquiring a deep interest in languages and remote places.
Fermor was an army officer who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He lived partly in Greece in a house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".
Fermor was an army officer who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He lived partly in Greece in a house he designed with his wife Joan in an olive grove in the Mani, and partly in Worcestershire. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 410 reviews
November 19, 2016
This book and its predecessor, A Time of Gifts—and its successor, The Broken Road, which I've yet to read—are about a walking tour the author took at nineteen years of age along the Danube in late 1934 and 1935. In A Time of Gifts he travels on foot from London—he hops a steamer across the channel—to the bridge over the Danube just before Esztergom, Hungary. In the present volume he continues his foot tour over the whole of Hungary, into Romania, Transylvania to the Iron Gates which then separated Yugoslavia, Romania and Serbia. As his memoir proceeds he discusses the region's many cultures, varying landscapes, geology, music, art and architecture, religious and military history, languages and more.
Everything is about to change, irredeemably. Hitler has been Chancellor for over a year. The Nazis will soon publish the Nuremberg Race Laws, the first formal step toward the Shoah. Some eleven million, mostly Jews, are about to be exterminated because of a manufactured delusion. Tens of millions more will die as soldiers, refugees, civilians. Yet here before the reader is a last unsullied glimpse of all that we are about to lose. It's very difficult for me not to read the book through that historical lens. Many of the authors' hosts and friends disappear after the war, never to be heard from again. The book therefore has enormous— indeed, almost unbearable—poignance.
The author shows himself at nineteen traveling happily, enjoying himself. He has letters from friends and acquaintances that introduce him to fascinating people all over the continent. He attends a luxurious nightclub in Budapest where acrobats perform. He crosses the Great Hungarian Plain on a black stallion named Malek. He sleeps under stars in a Gypsy camp after an evening spent sounding out words with his Romani hosts. He's an ecstatic polyglot. The nights when he doesn't have to sleep rough, remarkably few, are passed in the ducal splendor of great châteaux. Here's a taste from pp. 102-103. The author has just passed over into Romania and joined his hosts:
It's a remarkable perspective, pulled from his journals of that lost time and written 40-50 years after the fact. What a memory! I'd like to know where Fermor scholars place it among his many fine achievements. I rank it very high. Please read it.
Everything is about to change, irredeemably. Hitler has been Chancellor for over a year. The Nazis will soon publish the Nuremberg Race Laws, the first formal step toward the Shoah. Some eleven million, mostly Jews, are about to be exterminated because of a manufactured delusion. Tens of millions more will die as soldiers, refugees, civilians. Yet here before the reader is a last unsullied glimpse of all that we are about to lose. It's very difficult for me not to read the book through that historical lens. Many of the authors' hosts and friends disappear after the war, never to be heard from again. The book therefore has enormous— indeed, almost unbearable—poignance.
The author shows himself at nineteen traveling happily, enjoying himself. He has letters from friends and acquaintances that introduce him to fascinating people all over the continent. He attends a luxurious nightclub in Budapest where acrobats perform. He crosses the Great Hungarian Plain on a black stallion named Malek. He sleeps under stars in a Gypsy camp after an evening spent sounding out words with his Romani hosts. He's an ecstatic polyglot. The nights when he doesn't have to sleep rough, remarkably few, are passed in the ducal splendor of great châteaux. Here's a taste from pp. 102-103. The author has just passed over into Romania and joined his hosts:
Tibor's sister and some friends arrived from Vienna and there was much festivity and dressing up and picnics and finally a midnight feast on the very summit of the vine-clad hill. A bonfire was lit: a carriage disgorged four Gypsies—a violin, a viola, a czembalom and a double bass—who assembled under a tree. The amber-coloured wine we drank as we leant on our elbows round the flames was pressed from grapes which had ripened on the very slopes that dropped away all round. The vine-dressers climbed up, forming an outer ring, and when we had run dry they fetched fresh supplies from their cottages, filling all glasses until a cockcrow from an invisible farmyard spread an infectious summons through the dark; other cocks awoke; then the end of the Great [Hungarian] Plain glimmered into being underneath us and everything except the Gypsies began to grow pale. Their strings and their voices kept us company all the way downhill, then through the gates and along the grass path through the trees. Our footprints showed grey in the dew; and when we reached the pillars along the front of the house, the sound of startled nests and birds waking up and the flapping of a stork from the pediment showed it was too late to go to bed.
It's a remarkable perspective, pulled from his journals of that lost time and written 40-50 years after the fact. What a memory! I'd like to know where Fermor scholars place it among his many fine achievements. I rank it very high. Please read it.
March 2, 2021
Book 2 in Paddy Fermor's trek in the early 30s from Holland to Constantinople. Most of this book is spent wandering from count to countess and castle to castle in Hungary and Romania. Like his previous book, this one embraces the art, architecture, people, language and poetry of Europe. I loved it so much, I ended up buying all the Fermor NYRB would sell me. Now to get my wife to read them and to start planning our trek through Eastern Europe.
January 16, 2018
A Time of Gifts is stellar, but I struggled with this sequel. Fermor’s descriptions and encounters are just as delightful as he journeys from Hungary to the Balkans, but this second volume gets seriously bogged down with historical and etymological context. It’s awfully wordy. Still, there are some terrific moments when, looking back from older age, Fermor considers how lucky he was to have this adventure:
He is even able to recreate his thoughts at the time: a 71-year-old remembering how a 19-year-old stopped and marveled at his circumstances:
Many of the letters and diaries on which this travel trilogy is based were lost, so Fermor must in many cases have relied on his photographic memory to so vividly capture the places he went.
Another favorite passage:
“The conifers abdicated when the hardwoods began to outnumber them; and the ravine, deepening fast, coaxed the trees higher and higher until the oaks, mantled with ivy, pronged with the antlers of dead boughs and tufted with mistletoe, grew into giants.”
“Life seemed perfect: kind, uncensorious hosts; dashing, resplendent and beautiful new friends against the background of a captivating town; a stimulating new language, strong and startling drinks, food like a delicious bonfire and a prevailing atmosphere of sophistication and high spirits that it would have been impossible to resist even had I wanted.”
“I had meant to live like a tramp or a pilgrim or a wandering scholar, sleeping in ditches and ricks and only consorting with birds of the same feather. But recently I had been strolling from castle to castle, sipping Tokay out of cut-glass goblets and smoking pipes a yard long with archdukes”
He is even able to recreate his thoughts at the time: a 71-year-old remembering how a 19-year-old stopped and marveled at his circumstances:
“I sipped it slowly and thought: I’m drinking this glass of milk on a chestnut horse on the Great Hungarian Plain.”
Many of the letters and diaries on which this travel trilogy is based were lost, so Fermor must in many cases have relied on his photographic memory to so vividly capture the places he went.
Another favorite passage:
“The conifers abdicated when the hardwoods began to outnumber them; and the ravine, deepening fast, coaxed the trees higher and higher until the oaks, mantled with ivy, pronged with the antlers of dead boughs and tufted with mistletoe, grew into giants.”
May 23, 2025
Patrick Leigh Fermor relied on a Rhine barge, the odd lorry lift and his own two legs to carry him through Holland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Northern Hungary. Now, he’s crossing the Great Hungarian Plain on horseback:
Back in Budapest, Leigh Fermor had fallen in with a “noctambulistic” smart set (cellar nightclubs, scotch-and-soda, American jazz) whose country-housed, horse-lending cousinage extended deep into Hungary and Romania, along the still-twitching nerves of the old empire. With these connections, much of the eight months of 1934 recollected in Between the Woods and the Water (1986) pass in summery sojourn among the old Hapsburg nobility, our erudite wanderer pausing for weeks at a time to sample the “learning, munificence, and douceur de vivre” of that soon-to-be-swept-away class. Suddenly, the crushing hike described in this book and its predecessor, A Time of Gifts, seems doable when each stretch is recouped with picnics, tournaments of bicycle polo, and undisturbed hours in manorial libraries in which the lore and languages of the dominions just crossed can be learned from the lord’s own incunables and troves of ancient parchment.
Leigh Fermor makes all kinds of friends (gold-panning Gypsies, bawdy village crones, sun-brown reapers, a Transylvanian shepherd, even an impenetrably reserved Orthodox rabbi), but it’s his reports from within the “manor houses harbouring over-civilised boyars up to their ears in Proust and Mallarmé” that define this book. Marooned on reduced estates, strapped for cash, the Hapsburg grandees regale Leigh Fermor with memories of the Parisian belle époque, of Edwardian regattas out of Portsmouth, and bemoan the provinciality of the new nations in which they find themselves—all in “fluent and marvelously antiquated English.” Leigh Fermor is not an explicit imperial nostalgist like Joseph Roth, but encountering his long view of the movements of people and customs across geography, of the migrations, exiles, conversions and conquests that compose Middle Europe—“[Turkish:] victories long eclipsed, but commemorated here and there by a minaret left in their lost possessions like a spear stuck in the ground”—one cannot help but feel the ridiculous imposture of nationalism, and the futility and pettiness of tribal purity as a pretension of statehood.
This rapport with the displaced was also a feature of A Time of Gifts. He carries into the marches of Transylvania a “beautiful little seventeenth-century duodecimo Horace from Amsterdam,” the gift of a Baltic grandee exiled to Germany:
Closing out the decade of the 1930s as the lover of a Moldavian princess, and residing with her “old-fashioned, French-speaking, Tolstoyan, land-owning” family, Leigh Fermor was one of the rare Western Europeans appreciative of the Nabokovian political position—that is, he had equal contempt for the frank murderousness of Fascism and for the humanitarian pretentions of the Soviet Union:
“Old fashioned liberals” is exactly the phrase Nabokov used to describe his family.
Leigh Fermor’s wartime exploits include parachuting into Nazi-occupied Crete dressed as a shepherd. He hid out in the mountains, organized the resistance and, famously, coordinated the moonlight ambush, kidnapping and speedboat removal to Egypt of the island’s German commander.
He’s 95 now, living in Greece, in a house he designed and built (that casual English omni-competence! A brilliant prose stylist and daring commando, I bet he’s a great cook, too), and working busily on the third volume, which will take him through Bulgaria, Greece, and on to the goal of it all, Istanbul.
Whenever he got the chance, Malek broke into a canter, and one of these bursts turned into a long twilight gallop...
Back in Budapest, Leigh Fermor had fallen in with a “noctambulistic” smart set (cellar nightclubs, scotch-and-soda, American jazz) whose country-housed, horse-lending cousinage extended deep into Hungary and Romania, along the still-twitching nerves of the old empire. With these connections, much of the eight months of 1934 recollected in Between the Woods and the Water (1986) pass in summery sojourn among the old Hapsburg nobility, our erudite wanderer pausing for weeks at a time to sample the “learning, munificence, and douceur de vivre” of that soon-to-be-swept-away class. Suddenly, the crushing hike described in this book and its predecessor, A Time of Gifts, seems doable when each stretch is recouped with picnics, tournaments of bicycle polo, and undisturbed hours in manorial libraries in which the lore and languages of the dominions just crossed can be learned from the lord’s own incunables and troves of ancient parchment.
Leigh Fermor makes all kinds of friends (gold-panning Gypsies, bawdy village crones, sun-brown reapers, a Transylvanian shepherd, even an impenetrably reserved Orthodox rabbi), but it’s his reports from within the “manor houses harbouring over-civilised boyars up to their ears in Proust and Mallarmé” that define this book. Marooned on reduced estates, strapped for cash, the Hapsburg grandees regale Leigh Fermor with memories of the Parisian belle époque, of Edwardian regattas out of Portsmouth, and bemoan the provinciality of the new nations in which they find themselves—all in “fluent and marvelously antiquated English.” Leigh Fermor is not an explicit imperial nostalgist like Joseph Roth, but encountering his long view of the movements of people and customs across geography, of the migrations, exiles, conversions and conquests that compose Middle Europe—“[Turkish:] victories long eclipsed, but commemorated here and there by a minaret left in their lost possessions like a spear stuck in the ground”—one cannot help but feel the ridiculous imposture of nationalism, and the futility and pettiness of tribal purity as a pretension of statehood.
This rapport with the displaced was also a feature of A Time of Gifts. He carries into the marches of Transylvania a “beautiful little seventeenth-century duodecimo Horace from Amsterdam,” the gift of a Baltic grandee exiled to Germany:
It was bound in stiff, grass-green leather; the text had long s’s, mezzotint vignettes of Tibur, Lucretilis and the Bandusian spring, a scarlet silk marker, the giver’s bookplate and a skeleton-leaf from his Estonian woods.
Closing out the decade of the 1930s as the lover of a Moldavian princess, and residing with her “old-fashioned, French-speaking, Tolstoyan, land-owning” family, Leigh Fermor was one of the rare Western Europeans appreciative of the Nabokovian political position—that is, he had equal contempt for the frank murderousness of Fascism and for the humanitarian pretentions of the Soviet Union:
From the end of these travels to the War, I lived, with a year’s interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their Western equivalents—peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them—felt able to do.
“Old fashioned liberals” is exactly the phrase Nabokov used to describe his family.
Leigh Fermor’s wartime exploits include parachuting into Nazi-occupied Crete dressed as a shepherd. He hid out in the mountains, organized the resistance and, famously, coordinated the moonlight ambush, kidnapping and speedboat removal to Egypt of the island’s German commander.
He’s 95 now, living in Greece, in a house he designed and built (that casual English omni-competence! A brilliant prose stylist and daring commando, I bet he’s a great cook, too), and working busily on the third volume, which will take him through Bulgaria, Greece, and on to the goal of it all, Istanbul.
February 19, 2022
Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates was the second book in the trilogy by Patrick Leigh Fermor. What I find so remarkable about these beautiful books besides the beautiful prose and the European history complete with art and architecture, is the fact that these adventures were when he was a young man, nineteen years of age when he began his journey on foot from Holland to Constantinople, but he did not begin to write these books until he was a much older man. The first book in the trilogy, A Time of Gifts, was first published in 1977 and instantly a classic. It was followed by this, the second book in the trilogy published in 1986 when Leigh Fermor was seventy-one years old. As is pointed out in the Introduction by Jan Morris, these books are actually written by two men:
This book begins where the first book ends in 1934 with nineteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor standing on a bridge crossing the Danube between Hungary and Slovakia with a trip down the river to Budapest. Much of this book takes place with Paddy exploring remote castles, villages and monasteries, riding horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain and the crossing of the Romanian border into Transylvania. Remote castles, villages, monasteries and mountains are all beautifully described as Leigh Fermor approached the Iron Gates on the border of Yugoslavia and Romania. It is sobering to think that much of the old Europe that Leigh Fermor so beautifully describes is soon to be destroyed by World War II. In retrospect, there seemed to be an awareness that there were ominous changes beginning in Europe as reflected in this passage:
I am looking forward to reading the final book in the trilogy, The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos where Patrick Leigh Fermor completes the final leg of his journey. This trilogy is a magnificent series of books.
"So half a century separates the experience from the book, and the author is looking back at himself across a great gulf of experience and of history. The Second World War has changed Europe forever since Paddy hoisted his rucksack at the Hook of Holland, and his alter ego too has been weathered by a lifetime of travel and accomplishment. It really is almost as though 'Between the Woods and the Water' is the work of two separate writers, coming to the task from opposite directions, but blending their talents in a display of intergenerational collaboration."
This book begins where the first book ends in 1934 with nineteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor standing on a bridge crossing the Danube between Hungary and Slovakia with a trip down the river to Budapest. Much of this book takes place with Paddy exploring remote castles, villages and monasteries, riding horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain and the crossing of the Romanian border into Transylvania. Remote castles, villages, monasteries and mountains are all beautifully described as Leigh Fermor approached the Iron Gates on the border of Yugoslavia and Romania. It is sobering to think that much of the old Europe that Leigh Fermor so beautifully describes is soon to be destroyed by World War II. In retrospect, there seemed to be an awareness that there were ominous changes beginning in Europe as reflected in this passage:
"Long before this, startling news from outside had reached our valley. In the middle of the night, Hitler, Goering and Himmler had rounded up and murdered many of their colleagues, and a number--perhaps several hundred--of the rank and file of the SA. Nobody knew how to interpret these bloody portents but they spread dismay and little else was spoken of for a day or two; and then the topic died, drowned by the heat and the weight of summer."
I am looking forward to reading the final book in the trilogy, The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos where Patrick Leigh Fermor completes the final leg of his journey. This trilogy is a magnificent series of books.
May 25, 2025
“One longs for news from the buried ruins of some stronghold miraculously untouched since Batu Khan set fire to it, the trove, perhaps, of some Transylvanian forester digging out a fox or a badger and suddenly tumbling through the creepers and the roots into a dry vault full of iron chests abrim with parchments...”
This is the follow up to A Time of Gifts and follows the second stage of Fermor’s journey through Europe in 1933/1934. This one charts Austria, Hungary and the Balkan states, with the Danube being a central part of the journey. Remember Fermor was only nineteen. He remains as captivating a narrator as in the first volume and provides an interesting description of the cultural life of central Europe in the 1930s. It captures a society and way of life that was swept away within a few years. Fermor’s enthusiasm for everything and everyone he encounters follows on in this book from the first.
Fermor was writing later, from memory and diaries. In an introduction he says that he did worry about remembering the chronology of events, but he reflects:
"Then I said to myself that I was not writing a travel guide and that these things don’t matter, and from then on I let the tale unfold."
There’s a good deal of walking, travelling on carts, a few carts and even on horseback over the Hungarian plains. Fermor recounts a great deal of history along the way, and as in the first volume there are plenty of quotes and literary references. He seems to have got along with all classes and as he was travelling through the Balkans on foot, he inevitably met many groups of Romani and spent a good deal of time with them. He clearly started out with some of the usual prejudices, but unlike many of his literary contemporaries (not mentioning Rebecca West), his experiences and time spent with them clearly changed his views. His gregariousness continued into later life. The journalist Allison Pearson recalls when she was sent to Crete to meet him when he was 83 to write an article on him. She expected a frail old man she would have to “look after”. She just about remembers drinking more in 48 hours than she had for the previous 20 years and waking up under a bar. Pearson says that as they walked around Crete she could barely keep up with him and he was very much like he was in the book; observant of nature, breaking into song and poetry periodically and climbing things.
This doesn’t quite match the power of the first volume, but nevertheless Fermor is a captivating companion.
“Live, don't know how long,
And die, don't know when;
Must go, don't know where;
I am astonished I am so cheerful.”
This is the follow up to A Time of Gifts and follows the second stage of Fermor’s journey through Europe in 1933/1934. This one charts Austria, Hungary and the Balkan states, with the Danube being a central part of the journey. Remember Fermor was only nineteen. He remains as captivating a narrator as in the first volume and provides an interesting description of the cultural life of central Europe in the 1930s. It captures a society and way of life that was swept away within a few years. Fermor’s enthusiasm for everything and everyone he encounters follows on in this book from the first.
Fermor was writing later, from memory and diaries. In an introduction he says that he did worry about remembering the chronology of events, but he reflects:
"Then I said to myself that I was not writing a travel guide and that these things don’t matter, and from then on I let the tale unfold."
There’s a good deal of walking, travelling on carts, a few carts and even on horseback over the Hungarian plains. Fermor recounts a great deal of history along the way, and as in the first volume there are plenty of quotes and literary references. He seems to have got along with all classes and as he was travelling through the Balkans on foot, he inevitably met many groups of Romani and spent a good deal of time with them. He clearly started out with some of the usual prejudices, but unlike many of his literary contemporaries (not mentioning Rebecca West), his experiences and time spent with them clearly changed his views. His gregariousness continued into later life. The journalist Allison Pearson recalls when she was sent to Crete to meet him when he was 83 to write an article on him. She expected a frail old man she would have to “look after”. She just about remembers drinking more in 48 hours than she had for the previous 20 years and waking up under a bar. Pearson says that as they walked around Crete she could barely keep up with him and he was very much like he was in the book; observant of nature, breaking into song and poetry periodically and climbing things.
This doesn’t quite match the power of the first volume, but nevertheless Fermor is a captivating companion.
“Live, don't know how long,
And die, don't know when;
Must go, don't know where;
I am astonished I am so cheerful.”
June 8, 2015
Superb. If I thought that A Time of Gifts was a great book this may be a touch more compelling and deserves all superlative thrown at it by the critics. It is hard not to be envious of Patrick Leigh Fermor, a life that was adventurous beyond anything that the average person could comprehend. It is not the famous events that make me envious though, it is the seeing of a world that no longer exists. His travels in Hungary and Romania took in a world that was pounded to non existent pulp by Nazism a few short years later. We can even add at the (bitter) end of this book the eventual submergence of Ada Kelah and all the other places of interest when the Iron Gates dam was built in 1970. He writes a short final appendix at the end lamenting the loss. Onto the The Broken Road. I look forward to the conclusion of a young man's great adventure.
May 13, 2020
Dropping toward the watershed, the sun filled the place with evening light and kindled the windows and the western flanks of cupolas and steeples and many belfries, darkening the eastern walls with shadow; and as we gazed, one of them began to strike the hour and another took up the challenge, followed by a third and soon enormous tonnages of sectarian bronze were tolling their ancient rivalries into the dusk.
It is difficult to parse whether this was indeed a pale, less fragrant sibling of the first volume or that the harried period of the last five days has left me much less capable of appreciation? There certainly isn't as much walking as in the first volume. Fermor spends his time in Hungary and Romania, lost in relative "lotus-eating" while the summer sun bakes. There is considerable loafing and even a romance. It is interesting how avian activity affects him, the mass of storks in The Time of Gifts is here echoed in a few situations. Likewise the habits of sheepherders and surveyors offer rich if fleeting portraits of activity.
The concluding lament about the land around the Danube lost to hydroelectric dams is itself stirring. The political events which appear offstage elevate the stakes as we helplessly but longingly peer closer into the portal.
It is difficult to parse whether this was indeed a pale, less fragrant sibling of the first volume or that the harried period of the last five days has left me much less capable of appreciation? There certainly isn't as much walking as in the first volume. Fermor spends his time in Hungary and Romania, lost in relative "lotus-eating" while the summer sun bakes. There is considerable loafing and even a romance. It is interesting how avian activity affects him, the mass of storks in The Time of Gifts is here echoed in a few situations. Likewise the habits of sheepherders and surveyors offer rich if fleeting portraits of activity.
The concluding lament about the land around the Danube lost to hydroelectric dams is itself stirring. The political events which appear offstage elevate the stakes as we helplessly but longingly peer closer into the portal.
September 30, 2011
The middle leg of Paddy Leigh Fermor’s walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople finds him dropping into Hungary on Holy Saturday among the pageantry of elaborately costumed peasants, ornate processionals of gilded clergy, scimitared grandees, the raiment of Archbishops, all imbued with incense, gathering dusk, the drone of organs, and canopied by a horizon of migrating storks and the silvery sheen of the Danube sinking and shimmering into twilight. A typical PLF scene; and nothing is wasted on him. Once again, his eye discerns every striking detail, and quickly assimilates them into lush prose.
Through Budapest and across the Great Hungarian Plain (intermittently on foot, horseback, motorcar, riverboat, and train), then into the mythos of the bucolic territory of Transylvania and into the upper Carpathians, Paddy does what Paddy does- that is, make friends, find like souls despite barriers of language, culture, age, or class, immerse himself in the great personal libraries of the fading aristocracy (connections made in Vienna and Slovakia had proved very beneficial- he found himself welcomed into the old estates and chateaux with open arms, the old European tradition of sheltering wandering students hardly ever failing him), taking in piecemeal exotic languages and etymologies, limning people, animals and landscapes alike, and basically proving that youth is not always wasted on the young. And when he does set out again like the wandering bard or tramp, into mountainous forests or along the singsong of rivered valleys, it is nature that takes precedence, and his descriptions of storm-stricken skies, vales shadowed by clouds, looming cliffs and cataracts, and his observations of rams, sheep, deer, and especially the two-page long digression on the form and flight of golden eagles, are enough to make David Attenborough blush with jealousy.
Between the Woods and the Water and A Time of Gifts are inseparable books, and if indeed some kind of draft of the third and final volume of his masterpiece was sitting on his desk in the form of an eight-inch high manuscript when Paddy died this year, then I can only hope for some lovely NYRB complete edition coming out in the future (perhaps under the barely-resisted suggestion for a title of these volumes, Shank’s Europe). The difference comes in the rhythm. A Time of Gifts was a steady progression through the major cities and vistas of central Europe; Between the Woods and the Water finds PLF stopping for periods as long as seasons in pleasant quarters, taking in cities and spires and country houses for weeks on end, getting to know their people more intimately, indeed even having an extended love affair with the spectral Angéla (“The moon had triumphed over the mute fireworks to the east and the north and all the dimensions had been reshuffled. We leant on the sill and when Angéla turned her head, her face was bisected for a moment, one half silver, the other caught by the gold glow of lamplight indoors.”) These extended stays had the double benefit of educating Paddy on the customs and the histories of these places more deeply, and the visages of kings slaughtered or victorious, usurping princes, tragic queens, and vast roaming armies of men and elephants and all their equipage, weaponry and even their words spring to life and populate the landscapes and villages he haunts like legions of ghosts echoing through time. PLF’s mind finds correspondences in all the nooks and crannies of history, and in each place he comes upon the walls of time seem to disintegrate, all the events of history come tumbling through the present and we find ourselves situated, with Paddy, at the crest of some monumental peak of human endeavor.
It is along these lines that I came up with a kind of ideal of modern humanity, relating to Patrick Leigh Fermor. It seems to me that many of the wilds and unknown terrains of this world have either been conquered or at least identified. David Foster Wallace expounds the claim that since we are practically drowning in the overwhelming amount of information and data time has collected, it is for those of us alive today to sort and process that information, and the ways in which we do that come to define our contribution to history; that is, history is full and dead and we must sort the ashes. If that is the case (which I’m certainly not convinced of), then what PLF accomplishes, what his mind has taken to task, is the paradigm of this. The genealogical inheritor of the entirety of mankind, wandering among the accumulated constructs and ruins (architectural and ideological) of all of the centuries of efforts and attempts, successes and disasters, the relics of time, reassembling disparate histories, finding links between severed worlds, re-uniting the linguistic fissures from the fall of the Tower of Babel- synthesizing all of this and then kind of surpassing it by his mastery of it- surpassing it also in his goodwill and optimism, which takes even the horrors of the past and molds them with the grand spectacles into some kind of beautiful orchestral suite combining geography, philosophy, history, languages, and the difficult to define sense of wonder at the gift of being alive to have known and seen and walked through it all.
An early description of Charlemagne seems unusually apt to Paddy himself, and seems a proper encomium:
”Fireside mutterings, legends, centuries of bards and the lays of minnesingers have set him afloat somewhere between Alexander and King Arthur, where he looms, mural-crowned, enormous, voluminously bearded, overgrown with ivy and mistletoe, announced by eagles and ravens, dogged by wolf-hounds, accompanied by angels and oriflammes and escorted by a host of prelates and monks and paladins; confused with Odin, and, like Adonis, akin to the seasons, he is ushered on his way by earthquakes and eclipses of the sun and the moon and celebrated by falling stars and lightning; horns and harps waft him across the plains; they carry him through canyons and forests and up to steep mountain-tops until his halo is caught up in the seven stars of his Wain.”
Through Budapest and across the Great Hungarian Plain (intermittently on foot, horseback, motorcar, riverboat, and train), then into the mythos of the bucolic territory of Transylvania and into the upper Carpathians, Paddy does what Paddy does- that is, make friends, find like souls despite barriers of language, culture, age, or class, immerse himself in the great personal libraries of the fading aristocracy (connections made in Vienna and Slovakia had proved very beneficial- he found himself welcomed into the old estates and chateaux with open arms, the old European tradition of sheltering wandering students hardly ever failing him), taking in piecemeal exotic languages and etymologies, limning people, animals and landscapes alike, and basically proving that youth is not always wasted on the young. And when he does set out again like the wandering bard or tramp, into mountainous forests or along the singsong of rivered valleys, it is nature that takes precedence, and his descriptions of storm-stricken skies, vales shadowed by clouds, looming cliffs and cataracts, and his observations of rams, sheep, deer, and especially the two-page long digression on the form and flight of golden eagles, are enough to make David Attenborough blush with jealousy.
Between the Woods and the Water and A Time of Gifts are inseparable books, and if indeed some kind of draft of the third and final volume of his masterpiece was sitting on his desk in the form of an eight-inch high manuscript when Paddy died this year, then I can only hope for some lovely NYRB complete edition coming out in the future (perhaps under the barely-resisted suggestion for a title of these volumes, Shank’s Europe). The difference comes in the rhythm. A Time of Gifts was a steady progression through the major cities and vistas of central Europe; Between the Woods and the Water finds PLF stopping for periods as long as seasons in pleasant quarters, taking in cities and spires and country houses for weeks on end, getting to know their people more intimately, indeed even having an extended love affair with the spectral Angéla (“The moon had triumphed over the mute fireworks to the east and the north and all the dimensions had been reshuffled. We leant on the sill and when Angéla turned her head, her face was bisected for a moment, one half silver, the other caught by the gold glow of lamplight indoors.”) These extended stays had the double benefit of educating Paddy on the customs and the histories of these places more deeply, and the visages of kings slaughtered or victorious, usurping princes, tragic queens, and vast roaming armies of men and elephants and all their equipage, weaponry and even their words spring to life and populate the landscapes and villages he haunts like legions of ghosts echoing through time. PLF’s mind finds correspondences in all the nooks and crannies of history, and in each place he comes upon the walls of time seem to disintegrate, all the events of history come tumbling through the present and we find ourselves situated, with Paddy, at the crest of some monumental peak of human endeavor.
It is along these lines that I came up with a kind of ideal of modern humanity, relating to Patrick Leigh Fermor. It seems to me that many of the wilds and unknown terrains of this world have either been conquered or at least identified. David Foster Wallace expounds the claim that since we are practically drowning in the overwhelming amount of information and data time has collected, it is for those of us alive today to sort and process that information, and the ways in which we do that come to define our contribution to history; that is, history is full and dead and we must sort the ashes. If that is the case (which I’m certainly not convinced of), then what PLF accomplishes, what his mind has taken to task, is the paradigm of this. The genealogical inheritor of the entirety of mankind, wandering among the accumulated constructs and ruins (architectural and ideological) of all of the centuries of efforts and attempts, successes and disasters, the relics of time, reassembling disparate histories, finding links between severed worlds, re-uniting the linguistic fissures from the fall of the Tower of Babel- synthesizing all of this and then kind of surpassing it by his mastery of it- surpassing it also in his goodwill and optimism, which takes even the horrors of the past and molds them with the grand spectacles into some kind of beautiful orchestral suite combining geography, philosophy, history, languages, and the difficult to define sense of wonder at the gift of being alive to have known and seen and walked through it all.
An early description of Charlemagne seems unusually apt to Paddy himself, and seems a proper encomium:
”Fireside mutterings, legends, centuries of bards and the lays of minnesingers have set him afloat somewhere between Alexander and King Arthur, where he looms, mural-crowned, enormous, voluminously bearded, overgrown with ivy and mistletoe, announced by eagles and ravens, dogged by wolf-hounds, accompanied by angels and oriflammes and escorted by a host of prelates and monks and paladins; confused with Odin, and, like Adonis, akin to the seasons, he is ushered on his way by earthquakes and eclipses of the sun and the moon and celebrated by falling stars and lightning; horns and harps waft him across the plains; they carry him through canyons and forests and up to steep mountain-tops until his halo is caught up in the seven stars of his Wain.”
August 22, 2011
Like A TIME OF GIFTS (its predecessor), BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER has moments where the narrative slows down like turgid water eddying in the bend of a river, usually for architectural details or historical asides, but overall the muscular description of nature rules the day and makes the book sing. In fact, this sequel's setting (Hungary, Romania, Transylvania) lends itself to Fermor's strength even more than the first due to the vast swaths of dark forests splintered by sunlight, mist, songbirds, and streams. And that's not even touching on on the peasants in the fields, resting after berry-picking or cutting grains. It's all a lovely idyll that borders on storybook nostalgia as seen through the gauze of time.
Fermor does a lot less walking and a lot more loafing here. He hopscotches from castle to castle it seems, where the nobility-in-decline hold on to their crumbling splendor with fanciful meals, well-stocked libraries, exotic wines and foreign cigarettes. A 19-year-old man could get spoiled easily "roughing it" in this manner, but Fermor can only bring himself to gentle self-remonstration at best. The life he enjoyed was just too good to turn your back on in the name of discipline, he seems to be saying, and readers are more than willing to go along for the leisurely ride.
Here is an example of Fermor in full Thoreau mode:
"Just past its full, the moon laid a gleam of metal on the river and a line of silver wire along the tops of the woods. The July constellations and the Milky Way showed bright in a sky empty of vapour and as the moon waned, stars began to shoot, dropping in great arcs, sometimes several a minute, and we would break off our talk to watch them."
In addition to the beauty of woods and water, Fermor is more forthcoming about the beauties of the young women he meets. "There was something arresting and unforgettable about her ivory complexion and raven hair and wide sloe-black eyes. The house had remained uninhabited for some time and there was a touch of melancholy about it, and of magic, too. At least, so it seemed for the few days I was there as we walked under the Himalayan and Patagonian trees and looked down at the Maros, which the full moon turned to mercury. The woods and streams were full of nightingales."
Later, with a male companion, he was joined by a married woman whose husband was off on a distant trip. Fermor makes no secret of his fervor for this young lady. Later still, on a "boiling hot day," he and this 30-something nobleman skinny-dip in a river only to be discovered by two young women returning from gathering barley. "They stopped as we swam into their ken, and, when we drew level, burst out laughing. Apparently the river was less of a covering than we had thought. They were about nineteen or twenty, with sunburnt and rosy cheeks and thick dark plaits, and not at all shy. One of them shouted something, and we stopped and trod water in mid-Maros. Istvan interpreted, 'They say we ought to be ashamed of ourselves,' he said, 'and they threaten to find our clothes and run off with them.'"
The episode ends in healthy, Edenic "innocence" when the naked boys chase these laughing and squealing (the universal language!) girls to a hayrick where "all four collapsed in a turmoil of hay and barley and laughter." (Cut to commercial break.)
Reading Fermor, you learn things. For instance, did you know that Martin Luther (of all people) once said, "Who loves not wine, woman, and song remains a fool his whole life long"? Fermor doubts it, but later verifies it. There are also some reluctant prejudices at work: "A party of Gypsies, in their invariable way managing to turn a corner of the forest into a slum, had settled here with tents and dogs and hobbled horses; but their squalor was redeemed by the extravagant wildness of their looks."
Overall a rich and varied trip with ample rewards for readers fond of denser texts brightened by a humanistic flair. Hopefully the final episode will surface under the caring hands of Fermor's executors and editors now that he has died. After these first two efforts, I will gladly see him through to Constantinople.
As Robert Frost would say: You come, too.
Fermor does a lot less walking and a lot more loafing here. He hopscotches from castle to castle it seems, where the nobility-in-decline hold on to their crumbling splendor with fanciful meals, well-stocked libraries, exotic wines and foreign cigarettes. A 19-year-old man could get spoiled easily "roughing it" in this manner, but Fermor can only bring himself to gentle self-remonstration at best. The life he enjoyed was just too good to turn your back on in the name of discipline, he seems to be saying, and readers are more than willing to go along for the leisurely ride.
Here is an example of Fermor in full Thoreau mode:
"Just past its full, the moon laid a gleam of metal on the river and a line of silver wire along the tops of the woods. The July constellations and the Milky Way showed bright in a sky empty of vapour and as the moon waned, stars began to shoot, dropping in great arcs, sometimes several a minute, and we would break off our talk to watch them."
In addition to the beauty of woods and water, Fermor is more forthcoming about the beauties of the young women he meets. "There was something arresting and unforgettable about her ivory complexion and raven hair and wide sloe-black eyes. The house had remained uninhabited for some time and there was a touch of melancholy about it, and of magic, too. At least, so it seemed for the few days I was there as we walked under the Himalayan and Patagonian trees and looked down at the Maros, which the full moon turned to mercury. The woods and streams were full of nightingales."
Later, with a male companion, he was joined by a married woman whose husband was off on a distant trip. Fermor makes no secret of his fervor for this young lady. Later still, on a "boiling hot day," he and this 30-something nobleman skinny-dip in a river only to be discovered by two young women returning from gathering barley. "They stopped as we swam into their ken, and, when we drew level, burst out laughing. Apparently the river was less of a covering than we had thought. They were about nineteen or twenty, with sunburnt and rosy cheeks and thick dark plaits, and not at all shy. One of them shouted something, and we stopped and trod water in mid-Maros. Istvan interpreted, 'They say we ought to be ashamed of ourselves,' he said, 'and they threaten to find our clothes and run off with them.'"
The episode ends in healthy, Edenic "innocence" when the naked boys chase these laughing and squealing (the universal language!) girls to a hayrick where "all four collapsed in a turmoil of hay and barley and laughter." (Cut to commercial break.)
Reading Fermor, you learn things. For instance, did you know that Martin Luther (of all people) once said, "Who loves not wine, woman, and song remains a fool his whole life long"? Fermor doubts it, but later verifies it. There are also some reluctant prejudices at work: "A party of Gypsies, in their invariable way managing to turn a corner of the forest into a slum, had settled here with tents and dogs and hobbled horses; but their squalor was redeemed by the extravagant wildness of their looks."
Overall a rich and varied trip with ample rewards for readers fond of denser texts brightened by a humanistic flair. Hopefully the final episode will surface under the caring hands of Fermor's executors and editors now that he has died. After these first two efforts, I will gladly see him through to Constantinople.
As Robert Frost would say: You come, too.
November 25, 2019
Take a stroll across central europe in 1934, along the Danube to the Iron Gates, what a nice recollection! With its great descriptions of the countryside, this book would be a great prep for a visit of the Danube area.
If you want to be dedicated, read it with a map by your side and if you want to go for bonus points also a book on the history of Europe.
Along each stop of the walk there are references to the history of each town, influences of the various invasions by Turks and the counter influences of the Hungarians, Romanians, Europeans, and the Crusades.
A good insight to the area and though the book was written at a much later date the author used his diaries, notes, and recollections to try to keep out the hindsight. Some smatterings of this world still
exist, but in general lost, and worthy of revisiting.
I particularly enjoyed the stroll through the Banat, an area south of Transylvania, where one of my Grandparents grew up. The details are good enough I felt like I was going to see him mentioned on the street corner.
The author was also an English WWII superhero of sorts.
If you want to be dedicated, read it with a map by your side and if you want to go for bonus points also a book on the history of Europe.
Along each stop of the walk there are references to the history of each town, influences of the various invasions by Turks and the counter influences of the Hungarians, Romanians, Europeans, and the Crusades.
A good insight to the area and though the book was written at a much later date the author used his diaries, notes, and recollections to try to keep out the hindsight. Some smatterings of this world still
exist, but in general lost, and worthy of revisiting.
I particularly enjoyed the stroll through the Banat, an area south of Transylvania, where one of my Grandparents grew up. The details are good enough I felt like I was going to see him mentioned on the street corner.
The author was also an English WWII superhero of sorts.
January 4, 2021
This book follows A Time of Gifts, which was superb. In this part of his travels Patrick Leigh Fermor walks on foot, for the most part, from Budapest to the Iron Gates, a gorge on the Danube River beween Romania and Serbia. His end destination is Constantinople. He does get there, in the last book The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos and goes even a bit further to Mount Athos in Greece.
Fermor is nineteen when he makes this trip. He did it in 1934. The world is changed now. The war, dams, industrialization. He is educated. He is a polyglot, or on the way to becoming one. He is of the nobility, and this shapes his trip - sleeping outdoor with gypsies one night and in a four-poster bed the next.
What is best is Fermor’s description of nature and the world as it used to be, in Hungary and Romania, in Transylvania. History is told about the places where he passes, and this gives it a whole other dimension.
A few things gave me trouble. Would I ever be able to live off the hospitality of others in the way Fermor does? Those he stays with are all so wealthy so I suppose it is just irrelevant to think in such terms. Fermor has an amorous affair with a married woman along the way, but he IS only nineteen. Does that excuse him? She was older, but still no wiser. This sort of disturbed me. He was in a way flouting the hospitality shown him. Or maybe I should admire that he says it all, how it really was? This part of the trip was in a car and this too felt like he was cheating…. There is a map in the paper book, but it is almost impossible to follow since the places mentioned are often not indicated on the map. One more complaint - the author has such an antiquated view of the Mongols. Too bad the author never read Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
I very much disliked the narration of the audiobook by Crispin Redman. He exaggerates every line. He adds accents which make it difficult to hear what is being said. Many languages are employed and much is untranslated. You have French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Latin.....
The best parts of the book are those where Fermor is roughing it, walking, by himself, looking at the animals the land, the sky. It is amazingly beautiful how he describes nature, and that is what I love the book most for. These parts are delightful, and then when you visit the mansions and castles where he stays you are spying into a world that is no longer. It seems like a fairytale world, but it was real once.
As usual, I am rating the written book, not the eaudiobook.
Fermor is nineteen when he makes this trip. He did it in 1934. The world is changed now. The war, dams, industrialization. He is educated. He is a polyglot, or on the way to becoming one. He is of the nobility, and this shapes his trip - sleeping outdoor with gypsies one night and in a four-poster bed the next.
What is best is Fermor’s description of nature and the world as it used to be, in Hungary and Romania, in Transylvania. History is told about the places where he passes, and this gives it a whole other dimension.
A few things gave me trouble. Would I ever be able to live off the hospitality of others in the way Fermor does? Those he stays with are all so wealthy so I suppose it is just irrelevant to think in such terms. Fermor has an amorous affair with a married woman along the way, but he IS only nineteen. Does that excuse him? She was older, but still no wiser. This sort of disturbed me. He was in a way flouting the hospitality shown him. Or maybe I should admire that he says it all, how it really was? This part of the trip was in a car and this too felt like he was cheating…. There is a map in the paper book, but it is almost impossible to follow since the places mentioned are often not indicated on the map. One more complaint - the author has such an antiquated view of the Mongols. Too bad the author never read Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
I very much disliked the narration of the audiobook by Crispin Redman. He exaggerates every line. He adds accents which make it difficult to hear what is being said. Many languages are employed and much is untranslated. You have French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Latin.....
The best parts of the book are those where Fermor is roughing it, walking, by himself, looking at the animals the land, the sky. It is amazingly beautiful how he describes nature, and that is what I love the book most for. These parts are delightful, and then when you visit the mansions and castles where he stays you are spying into a world that is no longer. It seems like a fairytale world, but it was real once.
As usual, I am rating the written book, not the eaudiobook.
June 5, 2010
The travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor are rare examples of travel writing as literature. I have read four of them to date, including this one, its prequel A Time of Gifts, Mani, and Three Letters from the Andes. This volume is particularly fascinating to me because I am a Hungarian, and this volume covers Patrick's walking tour through Hungary and Romania (most of which was through Hungarian-speaking Transylvania).
A particularly rare feature of this book is a last, lingering look at the old Magyar nobility that was to disappear forever. The author was the recipient of courtesy from the last of the breed, all of whom introduced him to their friends further along the trail.
This book and A Time of Gifts were written from notes produced in the 1930s. What is so amazing to me is that he seems to have forgotten nothing in the intervening time. There was supposed to be a third volume, covering the final stage of his trip from the Iron Gates of the Danube to Istanbul, but that has not yet been written and probably never will, as Fermor is well into his nineties. More's the pity!
In addition to everything else, Fermor was also a brilliant warrior who, with a handful of Cretan guerrillas, captured a German general and conveyed him across several mountain ranges to where he could pass him on to the British forces on the island.
They don't make men like Fermor any more.
A particularly rare feature of this book is a last, lingering look at the old Magyar nobility that was to disappear forever. The author was the recipient of courtesy from the last of the breed, all of whom introduced him to their friends further along the trail.
This book and A Time of Gifts were written from notes produced in the 1930s. What is so amazing to me is that he seems to have forgotten nothing in the intervening time. There was supposed to be a third volume, covering the final stage of his trip from the Iron Gates of the Danube to Istanbul, but that has not yet been written and probably never will, as Fermor is well into his nineties. More's the pity!
In addition to everything else, Fermor was also a brilliant warrior who, with a handful of Cretan guerrillas, captured a German general and conveyed him across several mountain ranges to where he could pass him on to the British forces on the island.
They don't make men like Fermor any more.
July 26, 2019
Spokes of Sunset on the Backwoods of Arcadia
In a journey that traverses the Hungarian Plain, following the route between the Transylvanian Forests and the Danube River; Fermor seems transfixed by the kaleidoscope of languages, religions, and races. He focuses on traditions and rituals. He analyzes the spoken language and the history of each people group he encounters. And, he brings the geography to life in a way that many travel writers only begin to do.
Fermor begins with a quote that translates like this:
"People roar, names fade away,
Finally oblivion spreads the dark-night wings
Over whole generations."
As in the first book of the trilogy, he is telling the story of his journey a half century removed from the days in which he made the trip. This quote speaks of the fact that much of the trip remained with him throughout his life. In this book, we see many memorable moments. He spends many nights in castles, and meets people everywhere. He describes the people he meets in a richness of detail that reveals his love for traveling. But, its not just the people he gets to know. He often delves deeply into nature descriptions and the language and geography. And, as always, his vocabulary is sufficient to draw the scenes he is witnessing in the reader's mind.
I enjoyed following the storks mentally through this book. They appeared throughout in his travels. And, he rode across the Hungarian Plain on horseback. Those were just a couple things that stood out to me. He includes an inset map in the first chapter. This was quite interesting, since it gave a combined perspective of features in a prewar map.
I read this as part of a Buddy Read with a few friends. I was reading from a hard-back edition, and following along with the Audible narrated by Crispin Redman. Both were great ways to read the book, but I often had to stop the Audible to research some of the spots he was visiting. There is much to see here in this travel book.
In a journey that traverses the Hungarian Plain, following the route between the Transylvanian Forests and the Danube River; Fermor seems transfixed by the kaleidoscope of languages, religions, and races. He focuses on traditions and rituals. He analyzes the spoken language and the history of each people group he encounters. And, he brings the geography to life in a way that many travel writers only begin to do.
Fermor begins with a quote that translates like this:
"People roar, names fade away,
Finally oblivion spreads the dark-night wings
Over whole generations."
As in the first book of the trilogy, he is telling the story of his journey a half century removed from the days in which he made the trip. This quote speaks of the fact that much of the trip remained with him throughout his life. In this book, we see many memorable moments. He spends many nights in castles, and meets people everywhere. He describes the people he meets in a richness of detail that reveals his love for traveling. But, its not just the people he gets to know. He often delves deeply into nature descriptions and the language and geography. And, as always, his vocabulary is sufficient to draw the scenes he is witnessing in the reader's mind.
"Across the valley, the sun dropped among the lower ranges and clouds broke the sunset into long beams. They climbed to our ledge, touched the undersides of the leaves and lit up the sheep's wool. The oak-branches, the drifts of clouds and the mossy glooms winding through the trunks were suddenly shot through with spokes of sunset. Birds scattered the air and the topmost branches, and for a few minutes all the tree-trunks flared as crimson as a blood-orange. It might have been the backwoods of Arcadia or paradise..."
I enjoyed following the storks mentally through this book. They appeared throughout in his travels. And, he rode across the Hungarian Plain on horseback. Those were just a couple things that stood out to me. He includes an inset map in the first chapter. This was quite interesting, since it gave a combined perspective of features in a prewar map.
I read this as part of a Buddy Read with a few friends. I was reading from a hard-back edition, and following along with the Audible narrated by Crispin Redman. Both were great ways to read the book, but I often had to stop the Audible to research some of the spots he was visiting. There is much to see here in this travel book.
December 10, 2017
I realise that this, along with the others in this trilogy, are considered classic, and are thought by many readers to set the bar for travel writing - but for me, I didn't find it hard to put down.
At the start PLF points out that Books about this part of Europe incline to be chiefly, sometimes exclusively, devoted to politics, and thus abundance lessens my guilt about how small a part they play in this one, where they only appear when they impinge directly on the journey."
For me, it felt like this book outlined significant politics and history - and as I am the first to admit - my knowledge and understanding of this part of Europe is negligible - I was constantly baffled with who the many people were, and what was going on. For me it felt like this was a massive part of the book, and I found it a real battle not to skip forward.
Those parts which concentrated on the journey, and the interactions with the people he met on the way were great, and I am sure for those with a grounding in the history or Hungary & Romania would have enjoyed this read much more than me.
I don't have a copy of the third book of this trilogy, but I will keep an eye out for it, and will read it to complete the journey.
At the start PLF points out that Books about this part of Europe incline to be chiefly, sometimes exclusively, devoted to politics, and thus abundance lessens my guilt about how small a part they play in this one, where they only appear when they impinge directly on the journey."
For me, it felt like this book outlined significant politics and history - and as I am the first to admit - my knowledge and understanding of this part of Europe is negligible - I was constantly baffled with who the many people were, and what was going on. For me it felt like this was a massive part of the book, and I found it a real battle not to skip forward.
Those parts which concentrated on the journey, and the interactions with the people he met on the way were great, and I am sure for those with a grounding in the history or Hungary & Romania would have enjoyed this read much more than me.
I don't have a copy of the third book of this trilogy, but I will keep an eye out for it, and will read it to complete the journey.
August 13, 2019
The audience for Patrick Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water is readers with some mix of being arm chair travelers, lovers of language, little known history and some curiosity about life in Europe just before the Nazi onslaught. Between is book two of his remembrance of things past, rather his Journey Across Europe trilogy and is something less than the marvelous book one. Fermor remains very high on my list of the real world’s most interesting people. I was lucky to have read this as part of a buddy read. We had one serious decenter who did not like the book and holds a low opinion of its author. The more general opinion is that for the right reader this is an exceptionally good read.
Between begins exactly where book one ended. He is on a bridge over the Danube about to enter Hungary, where he will experience Easter. The book will end with his marvelous description of riding a boat though the Iron Gates where the Danube River passes through a magnificent, dangerous and (historically) hotly contested mountain pass between Serbia and Romania.
Fermor remains intensely interested in the history, geography, and life forms, human and animal his mostly on foot travel provides. The migration of the storks from Africa into southern Europe serve as something of the theme for the book but I preferred his observations of Eagles.
He continues to immerse himself in the private libraries that seem to be more available to him now that he has the full benefits of the friendships among the titled. They tend to pass him forward, including car rides and use of a horse; travel modes he had determined to refuse. Further he has his first admitted adult romance. An intrigue, a sincerely felt with a married woman. In fact some of the weakest passages in this book are while he is distracted by the lives of the titled. They admit to not having so much money, as the tradition of the extra privileges that even minor nobility in their time and place provide. The residual of feudalism.
Much of this will be swept away by World War II. Little of what Fermor did and experienced is more than generically possible for a 21st century foot borne traveler. Even so, the news of Nazi assassinations and increases in power tend to be ignored. None of the people Fermor meets have anything but excuses to fob off the hints and portents. In this his youth and romantic view of the world contrasts with other more mature travelers of the period such as Rebecca West and Joseph Roth.
Patrick Fermor is at his best in the wilds, describing the woods and the water. His delayed awareness of the risks he takes traveling with poor or no maps and occasional reliance on a pocket compass tend to strain credibility. His seems somewhat less comfortable with the more common people he meets now that he has had the experience of life in the manor. He is wary of Gypsies in a way that may have been appropriate, but to a modern reader suggests racism. He finally comes in direct contact with Jews and while sympathetic one has the impression that they are curiosities as the “Other”. This is not his take on working people he has elsewhere met.
I am looking forward to finishing the trilogy, but suggest that this may be a time to pause on this journey. Fermor has many other titles and some of them will also get my time.
Between begins exactly where book one ended. He is on a bridge over the Danube about to enter Hungary, where he will experience Easter. The book will end with his marvelous description of riding a boat though the Iron Gates where the Danube River passes through a magnificent, dangerous and (historically) hotly contested mountain pass between Serbia and Romania.
Fermor remains intensely interested in the history, geography, and life forms, human and animal his mostly on foot travel provides. The migration of the storks from Africa into southern Europe serve as something of the theme for the book but I preferred his observations of Eagles.
He continues to immerse himself in the private libraries that seem to be more available to him now that he has the full benefits of the friendships among the titled. They tend to pass him forward, including car rides and use of a horse; travel modes he had determined to refuse. Further he has his first admitted adult romance. An intrigue, a sincerely felt with a married woman. In fact some of the weakest passages in this book are while he is distracted by the lives of the titled. They admit to not having so much money, as the tradition of the extra privileges that even minor nobility in their time and place provide. The residual of feudalism.
Much of this will be swept away by World War II. Little of what Fermor did and experienced is more than generically possible for a 21st century foot borne traveler. Even so, the news of Nazi assassinations and increases in power tend to be ignored. None of the people Fermor meets have anything but excuses to fob off the hints and portents. In this his youth and romantic view of the world contrasts with other more mature travelers of the period such as Rebecca West and Joseph Roth.
Patrick Fermor is at his best in the wilds, describing the woods and the water. His delayed awareness of the risks he takes traveling with poor or no maps and occasional reliance on a pocket compass tend to strain credibility. His seems somewhat less comfortable with the more common people he meets now that he has had the experience of life in the manor. He is wary of Gypsies in a way that may have been appropriate, but to a modern reader suggests racism. He finally comes in direct contact with Jews and while sympathetic one has the impression that they are curiosities as the “Other”. This is not his take on working people he has elsewhere met.
I am looking forward to finishing the trilogy, but suggest that this may be a time to pause on this journey. Fermor has many other titles and some of them will also get my time.
May 13, 2025
Δεν είναι η λογοτεχνικότητα του (υπάρχει) ούτε η ευρυμάθεια του (που αφορά τον ίδιο, βασικά) που με εντυπωσίασε, αλλά αυτή η παλαιική ματιά προς τον κόσμο ως όχι ένα σκληρό και απειλητικό μέρος αλλά ως ανοιξιάτικο λιβάδι· έναν παιχνιδότοπο για ν' απλώσεις την αρίδα σου..
Σε κάθε σχεδόν σελίδα του, ο Πάτρικ είναι σαν να μου λέει: αφού βρεθήκαμε εδώ, ας ανακαλύψουμε τη χαρά της ανακάλυψης! Κάπως σαν αυτό που λέει o John dos Passos: Η ζωή είναι για να χρησιμοποιείται. Όχι για να την κρατάμε απλά στο χέρι σαν ένα κουτί ζαχαρωτά που δεν τρώει κανείς..
Σ΄ εμένα τουλάχιστον, αυτό είναι ένα ακόμη μάθημα ζωής που θα ήθελα να μελετώ κάθε εξάμηνο: ότι το δυσκολότερο βήμα είναι το πρώτο.
Ίσως να μην είναι τόσο απλό (πια) αλλά όταν τα υπόλοιπα αποτύχουν, θα ήθελα να είμαι σε θέση να βασιστώ σε ένα πράγμα, καλύτερα σε δύο: τα πεζοπορικά άρβυλα μου.
Σε κάθε σχεδόν σελίδα του, ο Πάτρικ είναι σαν να μου λέει: αφού βρεθήκαμε εδώ, ας ανακαλύψουμε τη χαρά της ανακάλυψης! Κάπως σαν αυτό που λέει o John dos Passos: Η ζωή είναι για να χρησιμοποιείται. Όχι για να την κρατάμε απλά στο χέρι σαν ένα κουτί ζαχαρωτά που δεν τρώει κανείς..
Σ΄ εμένα τουλάχιστον, αυτό είναι ένα ακόμη μάθημα ζωής που θα ήθελα να μελετώ κάθε εξάμηνο: ότι το δυσκολότερο βήμα είναι το πρώτο.
Ίσως να μην είναι τόσο απλό (πια) αλλά όταν τα υπόλοιπα αποτύχουν, θα ήθελα να είμαι σε θέση να βασιστώ σε ένα πράγμα, καλύτερα σε δύο: τα πεζοπορικά άρβυλα μου.
May 1, 2008
My favorite travel book of all time. Patrick Leigh Fermor walked across Europe in the 1930s with just a backpack and this eloquent account of what he found along the way is something I read again and again. His descriptions of Hungary and especially of Transylvania are utterly compelling and you wish you had a time machine to join him then. A fine excerpt:
All through the afternoon the hills had been growing in height and now they rolled into the distance behind a steep and solitary hemisphere clad to the summit with vineyards. We turned into the tall gates at the foot of it and a long sweep of grass brought us to a Palladian façade just as night was falling. Two herons rose as we approached; the shadows were full of the scent of lilac. Beyond the french windows, a coifed and barefoot maid with spill was lighting lamps down a long room, and, with each new pool of light, Biedermeier furniture took shape and chairs and sofas where only a few strands of the original fabric still lingered; there were faded plum-coloured curtains and a grand piano laden with framed photographs and old family albums with brass clasps; antlers branched, a stuffed lynx pricked its ears, ancestors with swords and furred tunics dimly postured. A white stove soared between bookcases, bear-skins spread underfoot: and, as at Kövecsespuszta, a sideboard carried an array of silver cigarette-cases with the arms and monograms of friends who had bestowed them for standing godfather or being best man at a wedding or second in a duel. There was a polished shellcase from some Silesian battle, a congeries of thimble-sized goblets, a scimitar with turquoise-encrusted scabbard, folded newspapers—Az Ujság and Pesti Hirlap sent from Budapest, and the Wiener Salonblatt, an Austrian Tatler full of pictures of shooting parties, equestrian events and smart balls far away, posted from Vienna. Among the silver frames was a daguerrotype of the Empress Elizabeth—Queen, rather, in this lost province of the former Kingdom—another of the Regent dressed as admiral of a vanished fleet, and a third of Archduke Otto in the pelts and the plumes of a Hungarian magnate. Red, green and blue, the squat volumes of the Almanach de Gotha were ready to pounce. A glittering folio volume, sumptuously bound in green leather, almost covered a small table and its name, Az ember tragediája, was embossed in gold: The Tragedy of Man, by Imre Madács. It is a long nineteenth-century dramatic poem of philosophic and contemplative temper, and no Hungarian house, even the least bookish—like English houses with the velllum-bound Omar Khayyám illustrated by Edmund Dulac—seemed complete without it. Finally, a rack in the corner was filled with long Turkish pipes. This catalogue of detail composes an archetype of which every other country-house I saw in Transylvania seemed to be a variation.
At the other end, beyond the double doors of a room which was half-study and half-gunroom, more antlers proliferated; figures moved in the lamplight and the voices of guests sounded, as I hastened upstairs to wash and get some of the dust off before meeting them…
Next morning revealed the front of a late eighteenth-century building. Between the wings, four wide-spaced Tuscan columns advanced and ascended both floors to form a splendid loggia. White louvred shutters continued the line of windows on either side, each leaf touching its neighbour on the façade when they were open while indoors the light poured across the floors; closed, with their slats ajar when the sun became too hot, they striped the wide polished beams underfoot with bars of light and dark,. There was a wheel with a handle which cranked out an enormous slant of white awning and, looking out, one might have been on the deck of a schooner painted by Tissot with tree-tops for waves. Beyond, the vine-clad hemispherical hill of Mokra soared like a volcanic island against snowy heaps of cloud and a pale sky. The smells of lilac, box and lavender drifted in, goldfinches moved about the branches, and now and then house-martins from the nests clustering along the pediment strayed indoors and flew in desperate circles or swept clean through the house and out the other side.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, 1934
All through the afternoon the hills had been growing in height and now they rolled into the distance behind a steep and solitary hemisphere clad to the summit with vineyards. We turned into the tall gates at the foot of it and a long sweep of grass brought us to a Palladian façade just as night was falling. Two herons rose as we approached; the shadows were full of the scent of lilac. Beyond the french windows, a coifed and barefoot maid with spill was lighting lamps down a long room, and, with each new pool of light, Biedermeier furniture took shape and chairs and sofas where only a few strands of the original fabric still lingered; there were faded plum-coloured curtains and a grand piano laden with framed photographs and old family albums with brass clasps; antlers branched, a stuffed lynx pricked its ears, ancestors with swords and furred tunics dimly postured. A white stove soared between bookcases, bear-skins spread underfoot: and, as at Kövecsespuszta, a sideboard carried an array of silver cigarette-cases with the arms and monograms of friends who had bestowed them for standing godfather or being best man at a wedding or second in a duel. There was a polished shellcase from some Silesian battle, a congeries of thimble-sized goblets, a scimitar with turquoise-encrusted scabbard, folded newspapers—Az Ujság and Pesti Hirlap sent from Budapest, and the Wiener Salonblatt, an Austrian Tatler full of pictures of shooting parties, equestrian events and smart balls far away, posted from Vienna. Among the silver frames was a daguerrotype of the Empress Elizabeth—Queen, rather, in this lost province of the former Kingdom—another of the Regent dressed as admiral of a vanished fleet, and a third of Archduke Otto in the pelts and the plumes of a Hungarian magnate. Red, green and blue, the squat volumes of the Almanach de Gotha were ready to pounce. A glittering folio volume, sumptuously bound in green leather, almost covered a small table and its name, Az ember tragediája, was embossed in gold: The Tragedy of Man, by Imre Madács. It is a long nineteenth-century dramatic poem of philosophic and contemplative temper, and no Hungarian house, even the least bookish—like English houses with the velllum-bound Omar Khayyám illustrated by Edmund Dulac—seemed complete without it. Finally, a rack in the corner was filled with long Turkish pipes. This catalogue of detail composes an archetype of which every other country-house I saw in Transylvania seemed to be a variation.
At the other end, beyond the double doors of a room which was half-study and half-gunroom, more antlers proliferated; figures moved in the lamplight and the voices of guests sounded, as I hastened upstairs to wash and get some of the dust off before meeting them…
Next morning revealed the front of a late eighteenth-century building. Between the wings, four wide-spaced Tuscan columns advanced and ascended both floors to form a splendid loggia. White louvred shutters continued the line of windows on either side, each leaf touching its neighbour on the façade when they were open while indoors the light poured across the floors; closed, with their slats ajar when the sun became too hot, they striped the wide polished beams underfoot with bars of light and dark,. There was a wheel with a handle which cranked out an enormous slant of white awning and, looking out, one might have been on the deck of a schooner painted by Tissot with tree-tops for waves. Beyond, the vine-clad hemispherical hill of Mokra soared like a volcanic island against snowy heaps of cloud and a pale sky. The smells of lilac, box and lavender drifted in, goldfinches moved about the branches, and now and then house-martins from the nests clustering along the pediment strayed indoors and flew in desperate circles or swept clean through the house and out the other side.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, 1934
November 21, 2014
I revelled in "A Time of Gifts", the first volume in a trilogy that recounts Patrick Leigh Fermor's extraordinary journey, which commenced in 1933, when he was 18 years old, and during which he set out to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. At the end of "A Time of Gifts" we left Paddy in Hungary, and this is where "Between the Woods and the Water" picks up the journey.
In "Between The Woods And The Water", Paddy travels to Budapest and thence across the Great Hungarian Plain, before travelling through Transylvania and the upper Carpathian Mountains, variously walking, riding on horseback, by car, on a boat, and by train.
Paddy continues to share his enthusiasm for life, language, history, nature, religion, people, music, food and anything else that piques his interest. His gift for making friends knows no bounds. In this volume, alongside the usual array of aristocrats, Paddy befriends two communities of Gypsies, young women harvesting, Transylvanian shepherds, an Orthodox rabbi and his sons, and various other people and groups he encounters. It appears there is no one with whom he cannot find common ground despite the differences in language, circumstance and culture.
This book was published in 1986, nine years after "A Time of Gifts", however both books share the same vivacity and freshness that belies the gap between the original experience and when the books were written. What elevates this book, and its predecessor, is Paddy's gorgeously poetic descriptions, which vividly bring his journey to life.
Another beautifully written travel book, that also variously serves as a book about European history, social history, relationships, youth, lost worlds, and all in the company of the most charming, erudite and enthusiastic travelling companion imaginable.
In "Between The Woods And The Water", Paddy travels to Budapest and thence across the Great Hungarian Plain, before travelling through Transylvania and the upper Carpathian Mountains, variously walking, riding on horseback, by car, on a boat, and by train.
Paddy continues to share his enthusiasm for life, language, history, nature, religion, people, music, food and anything else that piques his interest. His gift for making friends knows no bounds. In this volume, alongside the usual array of aristocrats, Paddy befriends two communities of Gypsies, young women harvesting, Transylvanian shepherds, an Orthodox rabbi and his sons, and various other people and groups he encounters. It appears there is no one with whom he cannot find common ground despite the differences in language, circumstance and culture.
This book was published in 1986, nine years after "A Time of Gifts", however both books share the same vivacity and freshness that belies the gap between the original experience and when the books were written. What elevates this book, and its predecessor, is Paddy's gorgeously poetic descriptions, which vividly bring his journey to life.
Another beautifully written travel book, that also variously serves as a book about European history, social history, relationships, youth, lost worlds, and all in the company of the most charming, erudite and enthusiastic travelling companion imaginable.
June 7, 2015
If I could, I would rate this book with ten stars!!!!! Patrick Leigh Fermor's book is not just a travelogue, it is a piece of art, a fresco evoking the world, the people and the customs long gone. Patrick Leigh Fermor was lucky indeed to have been the witness to the this civilisation destroyed by the Second World War and its aftermath. His skill, nay the virtuosity of the English language when describing the nature, the people or anything at all-left me speechless. I could literally see the landscapes rising in front of my eyes (perhaps because I have visited myself some of the places Patrick Leigh Fermor visited, like Esztergom with its magnificent cathedral and Budapest)!!! Until now, I only thought French language was capable of such evocative richness, but I am glad I was and am wrong. Now, onto the first and the third part of this unique trilogy (that is, if I can find the two volumes in my local library)!!
June 21, 2015
A fascinating read of a trip back in time to the 1930's in parts of Eastern Europe. The young Mr. Fermor's writing is very descriptive in the detail of his travels through the towns and villages, forests, mountains, weather, and the people he meets. He has a fine eye for architecture, flora and fauna, and an enhanced sense for the cultures he is traveling through. I was fortunate I was reading this on an E-reader, where I had maps and the means to follow his footsteps to see what he was seeing.
October 29, 2022
I read this over the course of several months, doling it out in pages and chapters because I found it so soothing and such a wonderful antidote to Real Life(tm). I know virtually nothing of Eastern European history, so much of the historical stuff just went right over my head, but in a nice way--I felt anchored in history thanks to Fermor's love of the subject and of the places he saw.
I thought it was funny that he was in Transylvania for a good long time (counting by pages of the book) before even mentioning Dracula, and then when he did, it was in a "this isn't very important" way. I still don't know if that's because he couldn't be bothered with popular fiction, or because the novel hadn't made enough of an impression on the world (I don't think this is true, but I don't know a lot about the publication history of Stoker's classic).
And we see his first serious love affair, and it's so sweet that I didn't even care that it was an adulterous one. Again, there's the confluence of past and present that existed in A Time of Gifts, where adult Patrick is viewing young Paddy and young Paddy is experiencing his present irrespective of what adult Patrick thinks. This, for me, is one of the great attractions of these books, the fact that those two times fit so neatly together and that adult Patrick doesn't feel the need to mock or belittle the man he used to be.
Of course, all that aside, this is a fantastic travel book, the very pinnacle of what I consider the two essentials of travel writing: an eye for description, and a compelling and sympathetic narrative voice. I look forward to dawdling through the final volume.
I thought it was funny that he was in Transylvania for a good long time (counting by pages of the book) before even mentioning Dracula, and then when he did, it was in a "this isn't very important" way. I still don't know if that's because he couldn't be bothered with popular fiction, or because the novel hadn't made enough of an impression on the world (I don't think this is true, but I don't know a lot about the publication history of Stoker's classic).
And we see his first serious love affair, and it's so sweet that I didn't even care that it was an adulterous one. Again, there's the confluence of past and present that existed in A Time of Gifts, where adult Patrick is viewing young Paddy and young Paddy is experiencing his present irrespective of what adult Patrick thinks. This, for me, is one of the great attractions of these books, the fact that those two times fit so neatly together and that adult Patrick doesn't feel the need to mock or belittle the man he used to be.
Of course, all that aside, this is a fantastic travel book, the very pinnacle of what I consider the two essentials of travel writing: an eye for description, and a compelling and sympathetic narrative voice. I look forward to dawdling through the final volume.
December 8, 2016
It took me a long time to read this book - I started off by listening on Audible, but found it hard to follow and switched to paper. In some ways it's a good book to read slowly, since after all Leigh Fermor's epic trek through Europe on foot as a teenager was carried out over a long period.
His writing style is beautiful and evocative, with many fascinating descriptions of the characters who he met en route. This would be a 5-star read for me, but I found the long digressions about the history of the region hard to take in at times and longed to get back to Leigh Fermor's account of his own travels. Looking forward to the final volume of this extraordinary journey.
His writing style is beautiful and evocative, with many fascinating descriptions of the characters who he met en route. This would be a 5-star read for me, but I found the long digressions about the history of the region hard to take in at times and longed to get back to Leigh Fermor's account of his own travels. Looking forward to the final volume of this extraordinary journey.
September 26, 2008
Probably the best (written, at least) travel book I've ever read. If you truly want a worm's eye view of European inter-war society, this is one book that really captures and encapsulates a sense of the fractured, schizophrenic (yet deeply historically aware) nature of what several stratums of society were thinking, felling and experiencing in that great historical pause before the coming of WWII. Highly, highly recommended.
April 2, 2022
Cerasela, da, știu, you told me so.
November 27, 2022
Even better, and more "literary" than Volume 1, this begins in Hungary and ends at the Danube's Iron Gates. The author becomes more candid about his various affairs with high-born and a few peasant women. And his sentences got longer, but not in an annoying way.
Page 28, describing how they dress in Budapest: "Tigers for turnout."
Page 41: "The few clouds in the clear, wide sky were so nearly motionless they might have been anchored to their shadows." Bless him for not adding the unnecessary "that" before "they"--it's a personal pet peeve.
Page 42-44: Understanding I was a foreigner, she asked "Német?" (German?). My answer "Angol" induced a look of polite vagueness: an Angle meant as kettle to her as a Magyar might in the middle of Dartmoor. . .[I]n a minute a grand-daughter brought a foaming glass of milk: they both smiled as they watched me drink it. I sipped slowly and thought: I'm drinking this glass of milk on a chestnut horse on the Great Hungarian Plain. . . When I dismounted, they crowded about him and patted and stroked his neck and flanks and scanned his points with eyes like shrewd blackberries."
Page 128, looking down on the river, "which the full moon turned to mercury. The woods and streams were full of nightingales."
Page 210 et seq. contains a sequence where he happens upon a family of Romanian Jews, who are reading from the Torah; the author doesn't understand Hebrew, but, in a beautiful epiphany, manages to puzzle-out that the verse is 2 Samuel 1 19:27 "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places; how are the mighty fallen!"
Page 28, describing how they dress in Budapest: "Tigers for turnout."
Page 41: "The few clouds in the clear, wide sky were so nearly motionless they might have been anchored to their shadows." Bless him for not adding the unnecessary "that" before "they"--it's a personal pet peeve.
Page 42-44: Understanding I was a foreigner, she asked "Német?" (German?). My answer "Angol" induced a look of polite vagueness: an Angle meant as kettle to her as a Magyar might in the middle of Dartmoor. . .[I]n a minute a grand-daughter brought a foaming glass of milk: they both smiled as they watched me drink it. I sipped slowly and thought: I'm drinking this glass of milk on a chestnut horse on the Great Hungarian Plain. . . When I dismounted, they crowded about him and patted and stroked his neck and flanks and scanned his points with eyes like shrewd blackberries."
Page 128, looking down on the river, "which the full moon turned to mercury. The woods and streams were full of nightingales."
Page 210 et seq. contains a sequence where he happens upon a family of Romanian Jews, who are reading from the Torah; the author doesn't understand Hebrew, but, in a beautiful epiphany, manages to puzzle-out that the verse is 2 Samuel 1 19:27 "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places; how are the mighty fallen!"
August 3, 2014
I was thoroughly lost in the Transylvanian forests.
The greatest value of Fermor's travelogues is perhaps as a document of a vanished world: Europe between the wars. Landscapes political and physical have utterly changed, communities remodelled, migrated or erased. These books are like maps from Atlantis.
The greatest value of Fermor's travelogues is perhaps as a document of a vanished world: Europe between the wars. Landscapes political and physical have utterly changed, communities remodelled, migrated or erased. These books are like maps from Atlantis.
January 22, 2015
The nine years between the publication of this book (1986) and, “A Time Of Gifts”, (1977) is noticeable. With time apart, it is as if PLF had taken a deep breath, begun to relax, and had warmed to his memories. His poetic descriptions, are, as ever, a challenge to surpass:
“Soon after an interval of silence, sheaves of organ-pipes were thundering and fluting their message of risen Divinity. Scores of voices soared from the choir, Alleluiahs were on the wing, the cumulus of incense billowing …”(p.16).
That brought https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5289... to mind]. Then just eighteen pages later PLF ruthlessly prunes exuberance; in mind if not in words:
“On a printed page the fierce-looking sentences let slip no hint of their drift. Those tangles of S’s and Z’s! Gazing at the peppery strings of diaereses’ and the tempers of acute accents all swaying one way like wind-blown corn, I wondered if I would ever be able to extort a meaning”(p.34).
Here, in one fell sentence PLF brings to the fore every thinking tourist’s greatest fear when in an unfamiliar country. Can I make myself understood? What if I can’t?
As in “A Time of Gifts”; there were many instances in this book where I stopped and wished PLF, for once, would NOT spontaneously head off on a diversion, even should such detours cause me to make pause for thought. I, the oppressor of innocence, would then feel guilty;. Two years after PLF’s sojourn in Hungary, when reading Joyce’s “Ulysses” he is excited to come across four words in Magyar, translated simply as “Leopold Bloom Esq.” (p.41). His excitement for this discovery is an almost childish thrill of possession; an innocent opening a literary cupboard; a discoverer of the society of the living.
I began to sense a man whose boyhood was perhaps not quite so different from C.S. Lewis’ in his use of imagination to … to what? Well, for one, to see heraldry with a vivid eye:
“When armorial fauna were mentioned, for a moment the room or the lawn would seem to fill with fork-tailed lions looking warily backward with blue claws and fangs; unicorns, mouldywarps, cockatrices, griffins, wyverns, firedrakes and little dragons covered with stripes; hawks and eagles were let loose and the air filled with corbies and martlets and swans with gold chains about their necks in spirals (p.101).
What a great needlepoint project this would make! That is, once I find out what a live fourteenth-century mole, a “mouldywarp”, a small, insectivorous mammal)) actually looked like.
This is no mere physical journey from A to B. Many constituent journeys and detours across classes, contour lines, and cultures, occur along the way. Here I sensed an impatient man who constantly sought awe and instead found humanity. PLF theorises about the origins of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, and fills half a page (p.113). PLF refers to his notes and riffles through his memory. He appears not at all tempted to interpret or compare his past in the light of his present. Fascinated by, and youthfully wondering about everything, he revels in diversion. As with other books I’ve read of his, I struggled to follow his journey on the map provided, which, though charmingly artistic, entirely failed to achieve its primary purpose of extending clarity. He gets away with it through irrepressible winsome-ness on the page. Every page.
“Soon after an interval of silence, sheaves of organ-pipes were thundering and fluting their message of risen Divinity. Scores of voices soared from the choir, Alleluiahs were on the wing, the cumulus of incense billowing …”(p.16).
That brought https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5289... to mind]. Then just eighteen pages later PLF ruthlessly prunes exuberance; in mind if not in words:
“On a printed page the fierce-looking sentences let slip no hint of their drift. Those tangles of S’s and Z’s! Gazing at the peppery strings of diaereses’ and the tempers of acute accents all swaying one way like wind-blown corn, I wondered if I would ever be able to extort a meaning”(p.34).
Here, in one fell sentence PLF brings to the fore every thinking tourist’s greatest fear when in an unfamiliar country. Can I make myself understood? What if I can’t?
As in “A Time of Gifts”; there were many instances in this book where I stopped and wished PLF, for once, would NOT spontaneously head off on a diversion, even should such detours cause me to make pause for thought. I, the oppressor of innocence, would then feel guilty;. Two years after PLF’s sojourn in Hungary, when reading Joyce’s “Ulysses” he is excited to come across four words in Magyar, translated simply as “Leopold Bloom Esq.” (p.41). His excitement for this discovery is an almost childish thrill of possession; an innocent opening a literary cupboard; a discoverer of the society of the living.
I began to sense a man whose boyhood was perhaps not quite so different from C.S. Lewis’ in his use of imagination to … to what? Well, for one, to see heraldry with a vivid eye:
“When armorial fauna were mentioned, for a moment the room or the lawn would seem to fill with fork-tailed lions looking warily backward with blue claws and fangs; unicorns, mouldywarps, cockatrices, griffins, wyverns, firedrakes and little dragons covered with stripes; hawks and eagles were let loose and the air filled with corbies and martlets and swans with gold chains about their necks in spirals (p.101).
What a great needlepoint project this would make! That is, once I find out what a live fourteenth-century mole, a “mouldywarp”, a small, insectivorous mammal)) actually looked like.
This is no mere physical journey from A to B. Many constituent journeys and detours across classes, contour lines, and cultures, occur along the way. Here I sensed an impatient man who constantly sought awe and instead found humanity. PLF theorises about the origins of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, and fills half a page (p.113). PLF refers to his notes and riffles through his memory. He appears not at all tempted to interpret or compare his past in the light of his present. Fascinated by, and youthfully wondering about everything, he revels in diversion. As with other books I’ve read of his, I struggled to follow his journey on the map provided, which, though charmingly artistic, entirely failed to achieve its primary purpose of extending clarity. He gets away with it through irrepressible winsome-ness on the page. Every page.
November 30, 2015
A giftee! **Pets the package** Thanks Judy, Susanna, Bob. xx
Description: The journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on in 1933—to cross Europe on foot with an emergency allowance of one pound a day—proved so rich in experiences that when much later he sat down to describe them, they overflowed into more than one volume. Undertaken as the storms of war gathered, and providing a background for the events that were beginning to unfold in Central Europe, Leigh Fermor’s still-unfinished account of his journey has established itself as a modern classic. Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume of a projected three, has garnered as many prizes as its celebrated predecessor, A Time of Gifts.
The opening of the book finds Leigh Fermor crossing the Danube—at the very moment where his first volume left off. A detour to the luminous splendors of Prague is followed by a trip downriver to Budapest, passage on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain, and a crossing of the Romanian border into Transylvania. Remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges that are the haunt of bears, wolves, eagles, gypsies, and a variety of sects are all savored in the approach to the Iron Gates, the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans, where, for now, the story ends.
So where Book One ended on a bridge, this carries straight on: PERHAPS I had made too long a halt on the bridge. The shadows were assembling over the Slovak and Hungarian shores and the Danube, running fast and pale between them, washed the quays of the old town of Esztergom, where a steep hill lifted the basilica into the dusk. It is April, the Easter weekend, 1934.
The Medieval Visegrad Castle - 13th century
Szentendre
St Stephen's Basilica, Pest, Hungary.
5* A Time of Gifts
CR Between the Woods and the Water
Description: The journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on in 1933—to cross Europe on foot with an emergency allowance of one pound a day—proved so rich in experiences that when much later he sat down to describe them, they overflowed into more than one volume. Undertaken as the storms of war gathered, and providing a background for the events that were beginning to unfold in Central Europe, Leigh Fermor’s still-unfinished account of his journey has established itself as a modern classic. Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume of a projected three, has garnered as many prizes as its celebrated predecessor, A Time of Gifts.
The opening of the book finds Leigh Fermor crossing the Danube—at the very moment where his first volume left off. A detour to the luminous splendors of Prague is followed by a trip downriver to Budapest, passage on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain, and a crossing of the Romanian border into Transylvania. Remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges that are the haunt of bears, wolves, eagles, gypsies, and a variety of sects are all savored in the approach to the Iron Gates, the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans, where, for now, the story ends.
So where Book One ended on a bridge, this carries straight on: PERHAPS I had made too long a halt on the bridge. The shadows were assembling over the Slovak and Hungarian shores and the Danube, running fast and pale between them, washed the quays of the old town of Esztergom, where a steep hill lifted the basilica into the dusk. It is April, the Easter weekend, 1934.The Medieval Visegrad Castle - 13th century SzentendreSt Stephen's Basilica, Pest, Hungary.5* A Time of Gifts
CR Between the Woods and the Water
September 9, 2008
These comments apply to this book and its sequel, "A Time of Gifts."
Puts all other travel books to shame. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a young man at the eve of World War II, traveled across all of Europe by foot, reaching Istanbul after over a year. On the way, he meandered through an ancient world that was soon to be completely destroyed. In this riveting story (put together years after the fact), Fermor gives us a picture of proud peasants and solicitous nobles clinging to a way of life that hadn't yet touched modernity, and he does it with the heady flavor of a student who was hungry to learn everything he could about the people among whom he was traveling.
Particularly poignant anecdotes involve staying in a monastery in Hungary, communicating with a monk in his schoolboy Latin, for they had no other common language. Another is of a mysterious Turkish enclave on an island in the Danube river delta, not too long afterward to be put under water by damming for electrification.
Every page is a new surprise and a delightful discovery, and Fermor's crisp prose does excellent justice to both the wild beauty of places like Transylvania, and the humanity of the people he met along the way.
Puts all other travel books to shame. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a young man at the eve of World War II, traveled across all of Europe by foot, reaching Istanbul after over a year. On the way, he meandered through an ancient world that was soon to be completely destroyed. In this riveting story (put together years after the fact), Fermor gives us a picture of proud peasants and solicitous nobles clinging to a way of life that hadn't yet touched modernity, and he does it with the heady flavor of a student who was hungry to learn everything he could about the people among whom he was traveling.
Particularly poignant anecdotes involve staying in a monastery in Hungary, communicating with a monk in his schoolboy Latin, for they had no other common language. Another is of a mysterious Turkish enclave on an island in the Danube river delta, not too long afterward to be put under water by damming for electrification.
Every page is a new surprise and a delightful discovery, and Fermor's crisp prose does excellent justice to both the wild beauty of places like Transylvania, and the humanity of the people he met along the way.
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