An Oxford student hitch-hiking from London to Constantinople on foot, living alternately in ditches and chateaux, in the pre-war stirrings of 1933 Europe. Written nearly 45 years after the fact, the narrative is reconstructed through diaries and notes, memories and research. It is quite the achievement, and I’m amazed at how much Fermor manages to fit into these 296 pages.
A Time of Gifts has been a book I’ve wanted to read for several years. Ever since I first heard of it, I’ve had an image of it as a sort of gold standard of travel writing. It haw often been mentioned in the same breath as Robert Byron‘s “Road to Oxiana” (1937) and Rebecca West‘s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1941). Reading more about Patrick Leigh Fermor’s life makes him seem like a larger-than-life character, who was both an accomplished writer, a war general and a high-life socialite. I also learned that he played a decisive role in a military operation in the Greek islands during World War Two – and that he was called a “real-life James Bond”.
The book is a rather straight-forward retelling of the route from “the Hook of Holland” to Budapest (the tale of the journey was intended to fill a trio of books, two of which were finished at the time of Fermor’s death, and the concluding one was posthumously published in note-form in 2013). Certain episodes are glossed over with reference to details having fallen away with the sands of time, and other episodes prompt associations to events later in Fermor’s life, which gives the narration a sense of exciting back and forth, which is novel to me. I can recall other retellings of youthful adventure, like Hemingway‘s “A Moveable Feast”, or Hugo Claus‘ “Een zachte verlieling”, but the jumpiness in Fermor is more dynamic. And the erudition! I can hardly keep up with all the kings, wars, monks, barons, Romans and poets. And to think that he was only a teenager at the time. Some of the ideas must have been formulated ex-post facto, probably many of the thoughts on art history and architecture. The prose is also filled with to me unknown or unusual words, and I find myself wanting to be an Englishman all of a sudden.
Some of the descriptions of nature lose my attention, but on the whole it is an engaging read, giving the reader a glimpse into a bygone era of interwar upheaval, still in the process of updating 19th century modes of existence into modernity mode. I learned a lot reading this book, and am grateful to Patrick Leigh Fermor for having had the fortitude to write it.
Kinship of all Species 