Trekking from the Woods to Constantinople: Exploring the Water and Beyond

Cornwallgurl: It was the publicity for Artemis Cooper’s biography of PLF that inspired me to get both “A Time of Gifts” and “Between the Woods and the Water” on my Kindle. I had some knowledge of PLF and his life, and was really expecting to enjoy the books, and it was a huge disappointment that the overwrought purple prose and entitled attitude of the author led to one of my biggest ever literary let downs. I was so sure that I was going to love them, that the fact I didn’t quite perturbed me. Despite incurring the wrath of the PLF fan club, I simply couldn’t face more purple passages and more country house hopping and name dropping, and it is now 3 years since I read the first book. However, I was recently in my local town, very early for an appointment, with nothing to read, and popped into the market and picked up a nearly new paperback of the biography (or rather, autobiography, but that’s another review.)
I hoped that this book would give me some insight into the man, and explain some of his actions and attitudes. Apart from a small amount of background about his parents (carefully left out from all his autobiographical works) it merely quoted almost verbatim his own...

United Kingdom on Nov 22, 2016

Armchair Explorer: A true classic of travel writing but if you think this is where the story starts and ends you'd be wrong. This is the second book in Leigh Fermors epic trek to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland as a young impressionable 18yr old with a zest for learning. Observational skills and the ability to turn this into the finest descriptive prose is what Paddy Leigh Fermor is highly regarded for. Sad in some ways to reflect how the looming World War 2 period would wipe away forever entire communities and places he so brilliantly describes and the happiness that some escaped, is tainted by the realisation that many would fall into the hands of a rampaging post war Communist Russia and the landscapes and places similarly affetcted. This book if read with patience and absorbed is, like its predecessor, A Time of Gifts, a travel book but much more a precise descriptive view into a thousand long lost worlds, attitudes, people, communities, ways of life and architectural treasures into what we know as Europe. I can imagine re reading both books over the coming years.

United Kingdom on Mar 04, 2015

Sally Walker: The sequel to A Time For Gifts recounts Leigh Fermour's walk across Hungary and Rumania, starting at precisely the point that his first book finished on the bridge at Esztergom on the Hungarian border. (A Time For Gifts told of the author's journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Esztergom; a journey undertaken when he was just eighteen and nineteen years old, undertaken in 1933 - 1934. His objective was to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, as it was then known). For those who have not yet read A Time For Gifts I strongly urge you to do so before beginning this book. Whilst it is not essential to read it, it will put this walk into context.

Leigh Fermor wrote this book some fifty years following the end of his journey; it was published in 1986. So it is a much older and wiser man looking back at and writing about his journey. I believe this adds much to this book.

This leg of his journey is dominated by him hopping from one gentleman's mansion to another, with a few open air sleeps, (or sojourns in rural inns) either alone in the landscape or with gypsies and peasant shepherd families. Amongst the landed gentry Leigh Fermour was passed somewhat...

United Kingdom on Dec 25, 2014

John P. Jones III: In that year Patrick Leigh Fermor decided there was a better way to obtain an education than attend Oxford. At the age of 19, in the middle of the winter, he decided to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (Istanbul). Although he made valiant efforts to maintain a diary of his walk, it was only half a century later that he decided to describe his journey in book form. In doing so, he imposed the phenomenal erudition that he obtained in the intervening five decades on his youthful self (and admits it from time to time - for example he bemoans the fact that when he walked through Aachen he did not know it had also been called Aix-la-Chapelle). It included a thorough knowledge of history of the places he traveled through, as well as the flora and fauna of the area. The first volume of his walk is entitled  A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (New York Review Books Classics)  which I read and reviewed a few months ago. This volume commences where the last one left off; he is standing on a bridge over the Danube, about to enter Hungry, with the town of Esztergom on the Hungarian shore, and the storks are flying...

United States on May 26, 2014

Terry D: First published in 1986, `Between the Woods and the Water' is the second part of Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey on foot, in 1933/34 when he was 18, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

The companion volume,  A Time of Gifts  is the story of the first part of his journey, from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube. The third volume, which completes his journey to Constantinople, was never finished but, based on an early draft and his original diary,  The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos  will finally be published in September 2013.

'Between the Woods and the Water' takes the reader on an entrancing journey through an Eastern Europe that existed in the years before the Second World War. Although his knowledge of European history - both secular and religious - must be near-absolute Patrick Leigh Fermor has no difficulty in weaving that knowledge into a compellingly beautiful story.

On the journey we encounter, at one extreme, the down-and-out inhabitants of the worker's hostels and, at the other, the last vestiges of an East European aristocracy still living in their slowly decaying castles. In a Europe that, of...

United Kingdom on May 04, 2013

Gs-trentham: As in the previous volume about this journey, Leigh Fermor writes as though in the present tense but with the benefit of hindsight. Once again, these are times remembered as much as times lived.

Other reviewers have remarked that in many ways this was a journey from schloss to chateau to castle, with just an occasional night under the stars. This means that we spend time getting to know his (mostly aristocratic) contacts, charming as many of them are, while we have to make do with simple descriptions of the lower orders. Well, yes, that is the book he chose to write and very engaging it is in its idiosyncratic way. At one point he sums up his journey by consulting, "a flask filled in turn, as the countries changed, with whisky, Bols, schnapps, barack, tzuica, slivovitz, arak and tziporo."

The passage through Transylvania is probably the most absorbing section, evoking not merely people and cultures that have changed radically - or disappeared entirely - but whose boundaries have been redrawn until the inhabitants have had to preserve their language and customs as citizens of a new state. Not everyone will linger over the detailed history of nations now gone and...

United Kingdom on Jan 22, 2013

Cedric Yoshimoto: On the one hand, there is a young Anglo-Irish romantic expelled from school, possessing uncommon charm, an astonishing facility for languages, and an interest in everything under the sun & moon. His collaborator is an urbane & erudite autodidact with the benefit of further research and a half century of hindsight. The young man is 19-year-old Paddy Leigh Fermor, who set out to walk across Europe when Hitler had just come to power. The mentor is the older Paddy, an authentic war hero, distinguished writer, and confidante of the old and new nobility. The result is a brilliant travel memoir, of which this volume is the middle part (the first is A Time of Gifts, the third alas was not published before his death in June 2011) covering Hungary and Romania. It suggests a bildungsroman as the young man exults in the wooded hills and tributaries of the Danube, sleeping rough, befriending peasants, laborers, and the last remnants of a dying class of landed nobility. The narrative wanders, like the author, around linguistic traces mirroring the flux of various peoples across the plains of central Europe. He chronicles remnants of a vanishing way of life as he passes from one Count to...

United States on Oct 10, 2011