A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube

5 Responses to “A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube”

1. J. R. Bowman says:

   July 26, 2010 at 12:31 am

   On the whole, I agree with the additional reviewers that Leigh-Fermor’s memoir of his travels is one of the best of the genre. The man can write and he writes well in a style that is both engaging and informative as he roves across a Europe that was soon to be engulfed in the utter ruin of World War II. The lives he describes, of both the city and the country, have a ’silent before the storm’ quality to them that few observers took the time to notice. But, I would fault Leigh-Fermor in two categories. The writer suffers from a surfeit of sincerity. He is a romantic through and through. Not only must he tell you where he went, but also how fantastic the people there were. There is a conspicuous lack of irony or humor throughout the entire book and at times, the leader’s enthusiasm can become downright exhausting.

   Secondly, Leigh-Fermor states in his preface that he has sometimes used his imagination to recall the events of the day. While I’m willing to give him a pass in the interests of economy and pacing of the tale (Every travel writer, from Herotodus to B. Chatwin has done the very same thing), far too regularly it seems like the characters and conversations are merely the leader’s imagination and, in the end, he is just having a conversation with himself. That is merely my opinion, of course. May I be proved incorrect.

   After finishing, I thought the book was worth the read. But, I don’t know if I want to travel with L-F any time soon.
   Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
2. R. Albin says:

   July 26, 2010 at 3:18 am

   Based on a walking tour taken by the leader during his late teen years, A Time of Gifts is a perfectly written memoir of travels in central Europe on the eve of WWII. Fermor chose to walk from Holland to Istanbul, following a route that was approximately the Rhine and Danube valleys. Written many years after the trip, and based both on memory, diaries kept during the trip, and mature reflections, this book is an cunning compendium of travel per se and essayistic reflections on different aspects of the trip. A couple of things stand out. Leigh Fermor appears to have had reasonably a few upper class relations and was blocked at various points during the trip in the homes of aristocrats. There is a strong sense of nostalgia for the lost world of the pre-war European landed gentry, though Leigh Fermor is certainly not sentimental about their fate. Another impression, particularly after the account leaves Germany, is the rural and traditional character of much of the Europe through which he traveled. A Time of Gifts gives a excellent sense of a Europe that vanished with WWII and the postwar modernizations of much of Europe. This book concludes with Fermor entering Hungary, and the tale is nonstop in another of his life tale.
   Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
3. Bozemaniac says:

   July 26, 2010 at 5:58 am

   What a wonderful book: adventure, humor, nostalgia, travel, company. Leigh Fermor is a graceful writer who re-makes a time before the destruction of the world: 1933-34 in Europe: wooden shoes and windmills and woodcutters lacking chain saws or trucks.
   
   This is a book to savor: delight in the trip.

   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
4. Jay Dickson says:

   July 26, 2010 at 6:32 am

   Patrick Leigh Fermor distinguished himself during the Second World War in the Greek battle. He did so even further by writing a series of travel narratives, including his very charming and erudite two-part, unfinished account of a walking trip he took at age eighteen from the Hook of the Netherlands all the way to Istanbul, of which A TIME OF GIFTS forms the first part.

   The book has an extremely high reputation among his fellow travel writers (including Jan Morris, who provides the exceptionally gushy foreword to this NYRB edition), who seem so taken by Leigh Fermor the man that they seem to rate the book more extravagantly than it perhaps deserves. While delightful, and of high interest to anyone curious about Mitteleuropa in the Thirties, the book can regularly be at times reasonably precious: its introduction takes the form of an “Introductory Letter to Xan Fielding,” and the prose, while undeniably clever and romantic, can get to be a bit much in places: “There was a reek of mud, seaweed, slime, smoke and clinkers and nameless jetsam, and the half-sunk barges and the waterlogged palisades unloosed a universal smell of rotting timber. Was there a hint of spices? It was too late to say…” Such whiffiness of prose seems unfrotunately bolstered at times by Leigh Fermor’s tremendous autodidactic learning, which he does not wear lightly in his narrative: though the book teaches much about the history of Europe (particularly during the Seven Years’ War), sometimes that much becomes too much of a muchness. And even agreed the young Patrick’s tremendous optimism (emphasized and caressed from the perspective of the same man writing this account forty-three years later), were his travels really so disembodied? Additional than for his sore feet you hear very small here about anything that happens to him not more than the waist. But while it is simple to criticize its faults, this book also must be agreed its due for its charms: I will certainly read the second part of Leigh Fermor’s epic walk through Europe.
   Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
5. MJ in Italy says:

   July 26, 2010 at 8:37 am

   A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor.
   
   If this book is what comes from getting kicked out of a excellent British public school, one can only wish fewer writers made it through. Not that Leigh Fermor needed more education, if it is, as they say, what is left when what you learned has been forgotten. In 1933, getting caught in flagrante–holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter–proved too much for the last school that accepted the challenge of the eccentric Leigh Fermor. He took a hike, walking from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, along the Rhine and the Danube. Forty years later and many adventures thereafter, he wrote it down for a pal he had shared waratime night watches on Crete with. Even in the hands of a lesser spirit, a report from Europe on the brink of World War II would be of interest, but with Leigh Fermor, it is pure enchantment. He is gregarious, curious, terrifyingly learned, sensitive and wry. With the meager contents of his knapsack (and later less, after its theft) and four pounds per month, he mixes with barge hands, toothless prostitutes, well-brought up girls, and genteel widows. He has Shakespeare’s gift for getting familiar words to show off hidden talents. His description of a night in Munich’s Hofbrau house has Mozart in the speed and lightness with which he gets opposing moods to minuet. Leigh Fermor takes us from room to room and brew to brew of the beer palace; from burghers “as wide as casks” to an S.A. chorus, from blond beer (a “cylindrical litre of Teutonic myth”) in mugs with a monogram like a cannon’s foundry-mark, to a “long Wagnerian chord” of dark beer. Strangling laughter follows the reader on a helpless reel through offensiveness, gluttony, joy and menace, to the sobering slap of the final axiom of British self-deprecation. Additional writers took entire books to described Germany in persons years, Leigh Fermor does it in mere pages. And that is only midway through volume one, there is still volume two: Between the Woods and the Water
   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5