This is a wonderful story about the kindness of strangers. It is an autobiographical story a naughty boy who drops out of school and decides to walk from Englanfd to Constantinople befor the second World War. It was a great comfort to me as I had a naughty daughter too and maybe she will grow up and become a hero of the resistance and a great writer with a knighthood! ( )

This first part of Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey to Constantinople takes him up the Rhine and down the Danube as far as Esztergom, on the border between Hungary and Slovakia. As others have said, a lot of the charm in these books comes from the way Fermor manages to recapture the youth and innocence of those days, while writing more than forty years later. It's difficult to make out how much is memory and how much he has reconstructed from later knowledge — he makes it clear that he lost the diary covering his journey as far as Munich. But, authentic or not, his impressions have a lot in them that makes me remember how I saw the world when I was eighteen and travelling independently for the first time.

Of course, there's an extra charm in the knowledge that the Europe he describes was about to change for good. Although he freely admits that he knew little and cared less about politics, he could not avoid noticing that Hitler had just come to power in Germany, and that there was fighting in the streets of Vienna when he arrived there. In a way, his naivety makes his few observations of the political scene more interesting (for instance, the scene where a young man proudly shows off his bedroom full of Nazi posters and emblems, then disarmingly tells him "You should have seen it six months ago, when I was a Communist!"), but this is clearly an aspect of the book that has been heavily filtered through his subsequent knowledge and experience.

Most of the book is written in a charmingly clear and elegant style, but there are occasional passages where he allows himself to get carried away, mostly when writing about the way his ideas on history and painting evolved during the trip, and it all becomes a bit Bridesheadish. Still, it's clearly a classic piece of travel writing, and I don't know why it's taken me so long to discover it... ( )

I do not use superlatives lightly; however, this may be the best book I have read. Fermor leaves private school in Britain in the early 1930's and decides to travel on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He intended to write a trilogy concerning his trip; but so far he has only completed two books. This book is the first and takes him from Holland to the Danube. His original goal was to eat and sleep with the gypsies; however, he eventually befriended members of the nobility and spent some time in their castles. The book is extremely rich in historical asides and one wonders how someone so young could be so knowledgeable. A possible answer is that he wrote the book at an older age from journals he had kept. In any event the book wonderfully captures a rising Germany under Hitler and he is quite prescient about what that may portend for the future. The book had a particular resonance for me because I libved for three years on the Mosel and his journey tracked many travels I have made. Fermor is a treasure. He is the classic English traveler of old: educated, erudite, observant and comfortable with people from all walks of life. Later, During WWII he served with British special forces. He parachuted into Crete where he lived in a cave with the Cretan Resistance and masterminded the kidnapping of the German General in charge of the island. See "The Cretan Runner." After the war, He became somewhat of a Hellenophile and moved to Greece where he still lives. His books on Greece - e.g., Mani - are also excellent. I hope he completes the trilogy before he dies. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/952221.htm...

Two brilliant, brilliant books of travel writing: the first describes Leigh Fermor's journey on foot through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia in the winter and spring of 1933 and 1934; the second takes him on through Hungary and Romania. They were written respectively forty and fifty years after the events described; the second volume ends with the promise "to be concluded", but it seems now unlikely that Leigh Fermor himself will finalise the account of his journey to Constantinople. (He is 92.)

The two books struck me slightly differently. I know the territory of the first one much better - as a teenager I explored Cologne, had an exchange with a family near Wiesbaden, went on a student visit to Heidelberg, and worked for a few months near Heilbronn, plus occasional explorations of Austria and business visits to Vienna, Prague and Bratislava in more recent years. In the second book the only place I have in common with him is Budapest (plus the two towns of Estergom and Szentendre to its north), though he does gaze from across the Danube at the fortress of Golubac, where the photograph I use for my standard user icon was taken.

Also over the course of the narrative, the style of Leigh Fermor's journey shifts - really from about two-thirds of the way through A Time of Gifts, when he finds the knack of staying with local nobility rather than dossing down in barns or police cells, which gives him a much more diverse though frankly aristocratic insight into his surroundings. This is particularly true in the Slovakian and Transylvanian passages, where he tends to end up talking to ethnic Hungarians or members of the other formerly privileged minorities, coming to terms with the new order. Another theme is the gathering historical storm, signalled by his passage through freshly-Nazified Germany and subsequent news bulletins as the situation worsens. He describes cities like Rotterdam and Ulm which would be flattened within a decade.

But there's a sense of maturing as well: the eighteen-year-old fleeing a succession of personal failures in England becomes a keen absorber of local lore and (discreetly described) a lover of local women as he travels. The passage of decades allows Leigh Fermor to poke fun at his younger self occasionally, but also to overlay the narrative with what he has learned since, including occasional updates on what has happened to the principal characters in the story. Much, of course, has changed, and the very last chapter mourns the submerging of much of the Danube valley as a result of the building of the Iron Gates Dam.

Anyway, these are both very highly recommended. ( )

A great evocation of places and times. Fermer was a young Briton who schlepped across Europe in the mid-1930's. Yet he looks back on it from the perspective of old age. To me, he is the epitome of the slightly aristocratic English academic with knowledge across an astonishing breadth - yet who remains engaged with the world. The real-life type of John LeCarre's spymasters.

The book has a certain leisurelyness that can grate, but once I got into the rhythmn it carried me along. ( )