A Time Of Gifts

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A Time of Gifts is regarded by many observers as one of the classics of travel literature. Written by Patrick Leigh Fermor and published in 1977 when he was 62, it is the first of two volumes (the second being Between the Woods and the Water) that provide an account of the author's overland walking trip from the Hook of Holland to the Danube in 1933/34. The long interval between the events described and the book's publication was due to the loss of the author's diaries of the jorney, which were found many years later in a castle in Romania and returned to him. A planned third volume, which would follow the author's journey to its completion in Constantinople, has never appeared.

Much of the charm of the book comes from the fusion of the immediacy and excitement of an eighteen year old boy's reactions to a great adventure with the retrospective reflections of the cultured and sophisticated man of the world that Leigh Fermor would become. The author could not have chosen a more exciting time to cross these lands. The Communists had not yet taken over the East, monarchies survived in the Balkans, and remnants of the old regime were to be seen in Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Hungary. In Germany, Hitler had just come to power, but the worst of his abuses were not yet in evidence.

The author has a firm grip on European history, culture and art, so the work is far more than travelogue. He meets a facinating array of people, from the inhabitants of workers hostels to down-on-their luck Austrian counts at home in their castles. He writes about how the landscapes he encountered and the human physical types were familiar from the Dutch and German masters.