Book Review: BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER (Book # 2 of 3) by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“It was a season of great delight; all seemed immeasurably old and at the same time brand new and totally unknown.”

I shall remember this book always for having a uniquely heartbreaking coda. After lavishly describing all the gorgeous places and people, in breathtaking detail, and ensuring that the readers have fallen in love as deeply as he did… Paddy breaks our hearts by telling us in the end that all that he had written of was now drowned in man-made dams. History and beauty wiped out en masse by economic demands.

“On Foot to Constantinople: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates” is volume two of Paddy Fermor’s “Great Trudge,” when, as a nineteen-year-old dropout, he sought meaning in life by going on an almost impossible trip: walking from Holland to Istanbul (which he determinedly called Constantinople.).

I read volume one (“A Time of Gifts”) a year ago, and it is not the sequence of events that stick to memory now, but an overwhelming impression of landscapes and vistas, leaving the reader a general feeling of mental refreshment without the physical punishment of actual travel. Book 2 echoes this feeling well.

There is also this bittersweet tang of nostalgia permeating both volumes, but especially pronounced in BTWATW.

For what can be sweeter to youth but to travel amongst beautiful new friends, and occasionally falling in love amidst the castles and plains of Hungary, Transylvania and Rumania (Fermor’s spelling)? The nostalgia is to be expected from a man writing this second volume in his seventies, of events half a century removed (he wrote Volume One only ten years earlier).

This second volume is less walkathon and more of “this is how my privileged friends” live, what with generous benefactors gifting horses (!!) and sponsoring car rides across Transylvania, with all manner of mischief known only by those privileged enough to afford these luxuries.

The best parts are the ones when Fermor is alone, walking through the Carpathian mountains and meeting gypsies and shepherds, sleeping under the stars and spying upon golden eagles and majestic deer. The wisdom of the elder merges with the sensual delight of the younger Fermor, and the result is page after page of luminous remembrances.

This delight makes Fermor an ideal vacation read, as each turn of the page is to be savored, passages read and reread for sheer pleasure.

Until he breaks your heart at the end. “Myths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of the shadow.”

Nothing lasts, Fermor reminds us. So seize the memory of each day. Better yet, write them down. For all become lost, except when saved by resurrective words.


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