A Time of Gifts
Cozy drama set in August 1961 BERLIN
Authors on location – Patrick Leigh Fermor
9th December 2017
#AuthorsOnLocation – PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
For some writers location is as integral to their story-telling as plot or character. TripFiction takes a look at some of these authors, for whom a sense of place has helped to define their literary output. For the fifth in the series we have chosen Patrick Leigh Fermor.
In a remarkable life, Patrick Leigh Fermor – ‘Paddy‘ – was expelled from school, and aged just 18 resolved to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). Carrying only some clothes, a few letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a collection of Horace’s poems, he slept in barns and shepherds’ huts, but was also invited into castles and country houses by the landed gentry of Europe.
During World War II, he famously led the operation in Crete to kidnap German General Kreipe, and in latter years lived more quietly in Kardamyli, amongst the people of Mani on the southern Peloponnese in Greece.
His writing, largely travel memoirs, is thought to have inspired a whole generation of new British writers. Here are some of Paddy’s best known books:
Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
Memoirs & travelogue set in Greece
This is Paddy’s spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece’s past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe’s wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygetus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peloponnese at the southernmost point in Europe.
Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece – south of ancient Sparta – is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa.
PLF’s hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic – together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli.
Memoirs & travelogue set in Europe
This is the first volume in a trilogy recounting his walking trip across Europe, and Paddy takes the reader with him as far as Hungary. It is a book of compelling glimpses – not only of the events which were curdling Europe at that time, but also of its resplendent domes and monasteries, its great rivers, the sun on the Bavarian snow, the storks and frogs, the hospitable people who welcomed him, and the world’s grandeurs and courtesies. His powers of recollection have astonishing sweep and verve, and the scope is majestic.
Between the Woods and the Water
Memoirs & travelogue set in Europe
This is the sequel to ‘A Time of Gifts’, and Paddy continues his walk through the length of 1930s Europe. From Hungary, and on to Romania and Bulgaria, PLF tells of remote castles, mountain villages, monasteries and towering ranges that are the haunt of bears, wolves, eagles, gypsies, and a variety of sects that are all savoured in the approach to the Iron Gates, the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans.
Memoirs & travelogue set in Europe
The Broken Road is the unfinished final volume of Paddy’s trilogy, telling the story of his great walk across Europe, as a teenager in the 1930s. Sub-titled From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, it covers his journey from the division between the Carpathian mountains and the Balkans to the monasteries of Mount Athos, on the Halkidiki peninsula in north-easterrn Greece
‘When are you going to finish Volume III?’ was the cry from his fans; but although he wished he could, the words refused to come. The curious thing was that he had not only written an early draft of the last part of the walk, but that it predated the other two. It remains unfinished but The Broken Road – edited and introduced by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper – completes an extraordinary journey.
And talking of Artemis Cooper, if this post has whetted your literary and travelling appetites and you would like to read more about Paddy’s extraordinary life, I cannot recommend her biography Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure highly enough. You can buy it through Stanfords, the World’s Largest Map & Travel Bookshop, with whom TripFiction are proud to have announced a partnership.
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