A Time of Gifts (1977) by Patrick Leigh Fermor is regarded by many critics as one of the classics of travel literature. Published by John Murray when the author was 62, it is a memoir of the first part of Fermor's journey on foot across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933/34. The introduction is a letter to his wartime colleague Xan Fielding. The title comes from a poem by Louis MacNeice.
A Time of Gifts recounts his journey as far as the Middle Danube. A second volume, Between the Woods and the Water (1986), begins with the author crossing the Mária Valéria bridge from Czechoslovakia into Hungary and ends when he reaches the Iron Gate, where the Danube formed the boundary between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Romania. A planned third volume, of Fermor's journey to its completion in Constantinople, was never completed. In 2011 Colin Thubron (Fermor's friend and executor) wrote in the The New York Review of Books that a "near-finished version" existed.[1][2] Later that year Fermor's publisher, John Murray announced that it would publish the final volume in 2013, drawing from his diary at the time and an early draft that he wrote in the 1960s.[3]
Many years after his travel, Leigh Fermor's diary of the journey was found in a castle in Romania and returned to him. He used it in his writing of the book, which also drew on the knowledge he had accumulated in the intervening years. Having the diary enabled him to express the excitement of a young man's encounters and discoveries.
In the book, he conveys the immediacy of an 18-year-old;s reactions to a great adventure, deepened by the retrospective reflections of the cultured and sophisticated man of the world which he became. He travelled in Europe before the Communists had taken over the East, when monarchies survived in the Balkans, and remnants of the old regimes were to be seen in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In Germany Hitler had recently come to power but most of his abuses were not yet evident.
Leigh Fermor's knowledge of European history, art and culture gives his work a deep basis. It is much more than a travelogue. He conveys the characters of an array of people, from the inhabitants of workers' hostels to down-on-their luck Austrian counts at home in their castles. He writes how the landscapes and the human physical types he encountered were familiar from the Dutch and German masters.