Book Review: A TIME OF GIFTS by Patrick Leigh Fermor

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title comes from a poem by Louis MacNeice: "For now the time of gifts is gone - O boys that grow, O snows that melt, O bathos that the years must fill..."

From the very start, we are swept up into the bittersweet nostalgia mixed with rapturous delight for "a thousand wonders awaiting."

What a wonderful little gem of a book! Apparently this is the most famous of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor's books, because he wrote it in his sixties, reminiscing about the time when, as an eighteen-year-old school drop-out, he decided to walk to Constantinople ON FOOT. ON A WHIM. I mean, who does that?!?

A TIME OF GIFTS is the first book in the trilogy about his epic journey. I think the main thing that makes it truly unique is because it's a REMEMBERED journey, begun in December of 1933 and ending in January of 1937. It's a tribute to memory, because it shows how much more clearly we see our past experiences using the lens of experience and worldly wisdom (the hazy fog of time be darned). Good thing our dear old Paddy Fermor kept journals!

I don't think I've ever read anything quite like this, and probably never will again. Paddy Fermor describes how he travelled through Holland, Germany (in the year that Hitler came into power!!), Vienna, Prague, and ends with him on a bridge about to enter Hungary, on the banks of the Danube. He sleeps in barnyards, police stations, and the occasional schloss (castle), experiences his first serious hangover and wakes up with rucksack and passport stolen, earns some pocket money by sketching strangers, makes friends with both noble and peasant, recites poetry when feeling lonesome and bored while trudging the pathways heading to Constantinople... always depending on the generosity of the warmhearted Europeans he meets on the way, and describes everything he sees with such beautiful prose! At times it's rather purple and screams "oh-look-at-how-well-educated-I-am," but the over-all tone is one of a soul aflame with the passion of remembered youth, of a war hero remembering beautiful treasures that were later bombed and lost to posterity.

I was struck by his description of walking into Germany in the year that Hitler was newly enthroned as Chancellor. The swastikas and brown shirts were everywhere, and so were his posters. He describes meeting Germans from opposite camps: those who adored the Chancellor and had rooms that were basically shrines to Hitler, and those who disagreed with him and his goons' tactics. Fermor writes: "It was as if an entire civilization were sliding into calamity and taking the world with it... it was a time when friendships and families were breaking up all over Germany."

To read Fermor elevates the reader's spirit, while simultaneously making this tired worker's blood pressure drop. To experience Fermor's past is to view a moving, talking painting. It brings to mind the difference between the best of animated films versus reality TV: to (re)visit Europe with Fermor is to see only what is beautiful and immortal.

"I lay deep in one of those protracted moments of rapture which scatter this journey like asterisks. A little more, I felt, and I would have gone up like a rocket... why should the thought that nobody knew where I was... generate such a feeling of trimph? It always did."

There's no place like home, but for all who seek to travel safely from their armchair (or in my case, my desk LOL), I can't imagine a better guide than Paddy Fermor.

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