Want a NOOK? Explore Now
In the winter of 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick (“Paddy”) Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took the better part of a year. Decades later, Leigh Fermor told the story of his journey in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, among the most vivid, absorbing, and beautifully written travel books of all time.
The Broken Road, now available in paperback, is the long-awaited account of the final leg of this youthful adventure that Leigh Fermor promised but was unable to finish before his death in 2011. Assembled from Leigh Fermor’s manuscripts by his biographer Artemis Cooper and the travel writer Colin Thubron, the book catches up with young Paddy in the fall of 1934, follows him through Bulgaria and Romania to the coast of the Black Sea, and ends with his arrival in Greece, the country he would fall in love with, fight for, and make his home. Perhaps the most personal of all Leigh Fermor’s books, The Broken Road brings a wonderful literary adventure to a delightful and memorable end.
“[A]n unforgettable book, full of strange encounters with a prewar Balkan cast of counts, prostitutes, peasants, priests and castrati. The greatest pleasure of all, as usual, is Leigh Fermor’s own infectious, Rabelaisian hunger for knowledge of almost every kind. His memory seems eidetic; his eyes miss nothing. He seems to carry within himself a whole troupe of sharp-eyed geographers, art historians, ethnologists and multilingual poets. For anyone who has tried to document a journey, reading him is a humbling and thoroughly inspiring experience.” — The New York Times Book Review
“The descriptions of waking in unfamiliar places are so seductive that even the most home-hugging reader will long to wake somewhere unknown. And some of the evocations of landscapes and views will live long in the memory.” —Anthony Sattin, The Observer
“In the end, it’s his moments of joy, his revelling in a young man’s moments of epiphany, which stay in the mind.” —Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books
"The Broken Road is superb, towering about the usual run of travel books....The Broken Road is better than any gleaming capstone: while giving us a more than satisfactory idea of Leigh Fermor's Balkan adventures, it also, in its raggedness, accentuates the seamless magic of the books that came before, and it wraps the whole enterprise in a pathos that humanizes his superhuman gifts." —Ben Downing, The Times Literary Supplement
"In a lamplit frenzy of mystic dance and song, among Homeric fisherfolk and swains, young Paddy discovers the underground ecstasies of rebetika in all its 'quintessence of fatalism.' Glimpsed from the future, he sets a course for the Greece that would keep his prose dancing ever after." —The Independent
“The now-complete trilogy documenting his journey is essential curriculum for any traveler….Fermor’s youthful forays across Bulgaria and Romania to the coast of the Black Sea make the reader wish all of life were one long journey of slow mornings on Turkish divans, welcome platters of raki and Turkish delight, crackling firelight and long conversations in various languages…Even those who have never seen the Danube will be struck with nostalgia—not for the author’s memories, but for their own, encapsulated in that same crystal mien of idealized youth…” —Longitude
"A fitting epilogue to 20th-century travel-writing and essential reading for devotees of Sir Patrick’s other works." —The Economist
"How fitting, for a man so young at heart, with such a boundless appetite for life, that his last published words should be those of a wide-eyed 20-year-old, embarking on what will be a lifelong love affair with Greece. His editors, Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper, have put this book to bed with skill and sensitivity. Friends and fans, acolytes, devotees and disciples can all rest easy. It was worth the wait." —Justin Marozzi, The Spectator
"The youthful joy shines through, and the deep cultural learning that was superimposed in later years is there in sufficient quantity to lend wonder to this fragmented tale....Anybody who loved its two preceding volumes will fall upon it hungrily. Anybody who has not read the two preceding volumes should do so without delay." —The Scotsman
Praise for Patrick Leigh Fermor:
"One of the greatest travel writers of all time”–The Sunday Times
“A unique mixture of hero, historian, traveler and writer; the last and the greatest of a generation whose like we won't see again.”–Geographical
“The finest traveling companion we could ever have . . . His head is stocked with enough cultural lore and poetic fancy to make every league an adventure.” –Evening Standard
If all Europe were laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than attempt to recreate it, or at least to preserve some sense of historical splendor and variety, by immersing oneself in the travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor.”—Ben Downing, The Paris Review
Praise for A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, the first two volume in the trilogy:
"This is a glorious feast, the account of a walk in 1934 from the Hook of Holland to what was then Constantinople. The 18-year-old Fermor began by sleeping in barns but, after meeting some landowners early on, got occasional introductions to castles. So he experienced life from both sides, and with all the senses, absorbing everything: flora and fauna, art and architecture, geography, clothing, music, foods, religions, languages. Writing the book decades after the fact, in a baroque style that is always rigorous, never flowery, he was able to inject historical depth while still retaining the feeling of boyish enthusiasm and boundless curiosity. This is the first of a still uncompleted trilogy; the second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, takes him through Hungary and Romania; together they capture better than any books I know the remedial, intoxicating joy of travel." — Thomas Swick, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
“Recovers the innocence and the excitement of youth, when everything was possible and the world seemed luminescent with promise. ...Even more magical...through Hungary, its lost province of Transylvania, and into Romania... sampling the tail end of a languid, urbane and anglophile way of life that would soon be swept away forever.” —Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review
“A book so good you resent finishing it.” —Norman Stone
"The greatest of living travel writers…an amazingly complex and subtle evocation of a place that is no more." — Jan Morris
"In these two volumes of extraordinary lyrical beauty and discursive, staggering erudition, Leigh Fermor recounted his first great excursion… They’re partially about an older author’s encounter with his young self, but they’re mostly an evocation of a lost Mitteleuropa of wild horses and dark forests, of ancient synagogues and vivacious Jewish coffeehouses, of Hussars and Uhlans, and of high-spirited and deeply eccentric patricians with vast libraries (such as the Transylvanian count who was a famous entomologist specializing in Far Eastern moths and who spoke perfect English, though with a heavy Scottish accent, thanks to his Highland nanny). These books amply display Leigh Fermor’s keen eye and preternatural ear for languages, but what sets them apart, besides the utterly engaging persona of their narrator, is his historical imagination and intricate sense of historical linkage…Few writers are as alive to the persistence of the past (he’s ever alert to the historical forces that account for the shifts in custom, language, architecture, and costume that he discerns), and I’ve read none who are so sensitive to the layers of invasion that define the part of Europe he depicts here. The unusual vantage point of these books lends them great poignancy, for we and the author know what the youthful Leigh Fermor cannot: that the war will tear the scenery and shatter the buildings he evokes; that German and Soviet occupation will uproot the beguiling world of those Tolstoyan nobles; and that in fact very few people who became his friends on this marvelous and sunny journey will survive the coming catastrophe." — Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic
"Those for whom Paddy’s prose is still an undiscovered country are to be envied for what lies ahead-hours with one of the most buoyant and curious personalities one can find in English." — The New York Sun
"Mr. Fermor…is a peerless companion, unbound by timetable or convention, relentless in his high spirits and curiosity." — The New York Times
"We are aware at every step that his adventure can never be duplicated: only this extraordinary person at this pivotal time could have experienced and recorded many of these sights. Distant lightening from events in Germany weirdly illuminates the trail of this free spirit." — The New York Times
"The young Fermor appears to have been as delightful a traveling companion as the much older Fermor a raconteur." — The Houston Chronicle
"[A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water] are absolutely delightful volumes, both for those who want to better understand what was lost in the violence of Europe’s 20th-century divisions and for those who appreciate the beauty and thrill of travel writing at its best." — The Houston Chronicle
"Leigh Fermor is recognizably that figure many writers of the past century have yearned to be, the man of action." — The Guardian
"He was, and remains, an Englishman, with so much living to his credit that the lives conducted by the rest of us seem barely sentient-pinched and paltry things, laughably provincial in their scope, and no more fruitful than sleepwalks. We fret about our kids’ S.A.T. scores, whereas this man, when he was barely more than a kid himself, shouldered a rucksack and walked from Rotterdam to Istanbul." — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
“Even more magical...through Hungary, its lost province of Transylvania, and into Romania...sampling the tail end of a languid, urbane and anglophile way of life that would soon be swept away forever.” —Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review
There is a library in limbo of great books by great writers never written: some mere notes, some stalled at a chapter or two, some in various pieces and drafts. For decades, the long- promised third volume of Patrick Fermor's walking trip across Europe has had a place on those ghostly shelves. This was the book that was meant to follow A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), accounts that, beginning in the fatal year 1933 and ending in January 1935, brought the eighteen- and then nineteen-year-old Fermor from the Hook of Holland to the Iron Gates, on the border of today's Serbia and Romania. Fermor had, in the early 1960s, written a version of his journey's last stage, which brought him to Constantinople (as he insisted on calling it), and he returned to it a number of times over the years. But, distracted by other affairs and tortured by writer's block, he could not complete the book, and it remained a persistent misery to him until his death at ninety-six years of age in 2011. Now, I am happy to report, travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron and Fermor's biographer, Artemis Cooper, have entered the breach to bring out what they have titled The Broken Road, the trilogy's final installment, knitted up nicely with care and discernment.
The book brings Fermor from Oroşva on the Danube through parts of Rumania (then the accepted spelling for Romania), Bulgaria, and Turkey. It also includes his time in Greece, staying in monasteries on the sacred island of Mount Athos in early 1935, an account drawn from his one extant journal. As for the other journals kept during the trip, they and his richly detailed letters to his mother were lost in three separate tragedies. Fermor had to recreate the long journey from "surviving cartouches of memory," the stamps on his old passport, and his markings on a tattered map. Again and again, he laments the impossibility of recapturing the entirety of that vanished past.
Often, I must have-completely failed to remember, owing to some private defect, buildings of tremendous interest (which I would give perhaps a great deal to see now), whole mountain ranges teeming with history and with natural wonders, political trends and events of momentous importance. This last consideration prompts the thought that even after such a long time-lag, this must be one of the most unscoopiest travel accounts ever to see the light.As it happens, the young Fermor was not especially interested in political developments, and his account only now and again touches on them, one instance being the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in October 1934. Its announcement resulted in maniacal, glass-smashing rejoicing among the Bulgarians with whom he was drinking at the time. Still, writing much later, he is sadly aware that as he traveled across Central and Eastern Europe, he was witnessing the very end of an epoch, one whose death throes began with the First World War and the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and whose end was marked by the obliteration and horror of the Second World War, the near extinction of the region's Jewish and Gypsy populations, and the vitiating effect of the Iron Curtain. "Nearly all the people of this book, as it turned out, were attached to trails of powder which were already invisibly burning, to explode during the next decade and a half."
Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers
Anonymous
Posted Tue Apr 08 00:00:00 EDT 2014
Good
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted Tue Apr 08 00:00:00 EDT 2014
She cries
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Overview
In the winter of 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick (“Paddy”) Leigh Fermor set out to walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took the better part of a year. Decades later, Leigh Fermor told the story of his journey in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, among the most vivid, absorbing, and beautifully written travel books of all time.
The Broken Road, now available in paperback, is the long-awaited account of the final leg...