Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates
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- ISBN13: 9781590171660
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor started in 1933 at the age of eighteen—to cross Europe on foot with an ‘urgent situation’ allowance of a pound a day—proved so rich in experiences that when much later he sat down to clarify them, they overflowed into more than one volume. Undertaken as the storms of war gathered, and providing a context for unfolding events in Central Europe, this journey has captivated generations. Between the Woods and the Water has won as many prestigious awards as its predecessor.
The opening of Between the Woods and the Water finds Leigh Fermor crossing the Danube, at the moment where his first volume—A Time of Gifts—left off. He takes the reader with him downriver to Budapest, then on horseback across the Fantastic Hungarian Unadorned and over the Rumanian 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 dividing the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans where, for now, the account ends.
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This is the continuation of, “A Time of Gifts.” The English youth continues his walk across Europe to Constantinople. He picks up now in Austria, on to Hungary following the Danube valley. I wanted to quit reading this – page after page of allusions to east European history from Roman and pre-Roman times, Hungarian geography, reflections on Slavic languages. Esoterics I cannot appreciate. Still, they lured me and challenged me. These are places and these are people – Magyars and Gypsies – we seldom find in writing. We are introduced just as an era is about to end and everything is to change. It can be a book to go to bed with.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
I was not able to get through this book, so four stars constitutes a “pass” from me.
Written more than 50 years after the walking tour described, this book is really a literary opus and not a travel account laced with some history and humor in the vein of, say, Bill Bryson.
I sound as if I’m panning the book, but I’m really adage it’s not what I expected. Please read additional reviews to see if the prose style is something that would interest you.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
As with a Time for Gifts, Fermor provides an account of pre-WWII Europe that is a wonderful recollection of how things used to be. My chief complaint is that Fermor, while traveling, somehow spends far too much time with nobles of one type or another…something that he gently berates himself for several times in the book. I came away wishing he had spent more time with the peasants in the regions he traveled, but then, can we really berate his then teenage self for wishing to hang with the nobility?
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book and its sequel, “Between the Woods and the Water,” is truly a classic of the personal odyssey genre. Together they are the report by the English leader of a diary he wrote between the ages of 19 and 22 while he walked from Holland to Istanbul. But he writes his report after a lengthy career in military service and, among additional things, in television journalism. The result combines the enthusiasm of a young student with the measured and spare prose of a seasoned and skilled veteran. The leader as student is amazingly well schooled, even though thrown out of his public school. His reflections on what he sees are both erudite and nearly poetic. (Read, e.g., the chapter, Prague Under Snow.) They don’t serve as a normal travel guide, but they’ll introduce you to the lands he traverses in a way that will make your own visit unusually well informed.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I got this book before Amazon existed and I’ve bought multiple copies since then.
Buy this and treasure it, give it to your friends.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5