Customer Reviews

Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland

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Like most literary masterpieces this marvelous book has a outer vehicle that develops an inner theme. The vehicle is a journey on foot, horseback and barge across Europe in the 1930's when the author was 19. The inner theme is a resolution of polarities and opposites of all kinds. First there is the overriding polarity of solitude and company. He enjoys spending time with friends and friends of friends at their country homes in Hungary and Roumania and passing hours in their sometimes fabulous libraries but he finds refreshment and spiritual renewal in long solitary walks in wooded mountains and along the banks of the Danube where he meets an occasional deer or golden eagle. He relishes staying with his wealthy, worldly and sophisticated hosts but also enjoys the company of peasants, gypsies and lumberjacks. He likes passing comfortable nights in reasonably soft beds with clean linens but doesn't shrink from sleeping in hayricks or under sheltering oaks. The interplay of past and present are another polarity he weaves into the narrative. His knowledge of history and use of it in this work is both magnificent and enviable. Leigh Fermor is in fact one of the most cultured contemporary writers I have had the good fortune to read. He is a good linguist, a masterful historian and , surprisingly, a knowledgeable theologian. But that is only half the story. He is also a super-macho man of action completely aware of his body and its interaction with the environment. This we know from his activities, almost heroic feats, during WWII, especially in Crete. In the present book he coordinates his mental and physical endowments to produce a gorgeously textured masterpiece of English prose. Sex is not absent from the narrative but it is never described in terms that could be considered even remotely graphic. Acts are kept in the wings while he concentrates on the social, intellectual, and aesthetic dimensions of his relations with women. Unfortunately Amazon.com does not keep an ample stock of Leigh Fermor's works, so I had to purchase my copy from Amazon.co.uk. I may be impatient but my sense of company loyalty is unimpeachable. No?

I have recently re-read and completed this book (borrowed from the library!) after having lost my own copy on a plane in Europe over a decade ago. The writing is exquisite, often amusing, as this vigorous youthful traveler - mostly on foot but also on horse, the occasional car, and Danube steamship -- is brought back to life by his seasoned self 50 years later. And, though written in the 1980's, it is sometimes eerily relevant to 1999. A quote, "I stayed the night at a bargeman's tavern in Mohács in order to see the battlefield where Suleiman had overthrown King Lajos: one of history's most dark and shattering landmarks: a defeat as fatal to Hungary as Kossovo to the Serbs and Constantinople to the Greeks." Later, he refers to "the tragic region of Kossovo, where old Serbia, Macedonia, and Albania march." These passages are interspersed with playful romps with Hungarian aristocrats, parties, nights spent with Rumanian shephards, orthodox rabbis and their lumberjack families, and other unforgettable people whose lives were about to be forever changed by World War II and its aftermath. A gorgeous read as was the earlier Time of Gifts and hopefully the last volume through Rumania and Bulgaria to the Black Sea.

Patrick Leigh Fermor not only fills the 'unforgiving minute' but describes that experience in a way that transports us to that minute. One line from "Between the Woods and the Water" stays in my mind. "The heat and weight of the summer bore down and not a leaf stirred". Or, how about, "the newly distilled spirit had taken out the peasants like sniper". For a feeling of 'being there' he can't be beaten, certainly not by Ernest Hemingway who tried and failed by appearing too contrived. The writers who achieve this power to transport, as musicians or painters do can let us ignore their presence and I think that is their artistic intention, to merely present (with all their craftsmanship but so it doesn't show). Paul Bowles is such a writer as is Elmore Leonard. But that's another story.

I am not aware of any other account of Ada Kaleh, the island in the Danube populated by a Turkish enclave that was lost when the river was dammed in the '40s. I found an old postcard of the island in Hungary, and it's one of my favorite possesions.

I loved this book and other writing by the Author. Reading this book is like travelling with a friend. The author tells a beautiful tale of Europe just before the war. His style and tempo are close and personal, and when you reach the end of the trip, you know that you have encountered the Europe of a bygone era. Here in Canada many of my friends parents' were born in Germany, Hungary, and Romania. I tell them that this book is required reading.

Between the Woods and the Water, along with Time of Gifts, must rank in the top 10 travel books of all time (including Colossus of Maroussi,etc.), for several reasons. First, Pat Fermor bridges two period legacies - the slow stately moving time of Old World nobility and comfort, from the Baron's oak, leather and velvet encased library to the yeoman's deer headed, giant stone fireplaced, stained glassed and snow surrounded pub, and the modern world (where not 5 years later, he was to parachute into Crete and lead a band of Cretan partisans against the Nazi occupation). One can tell from Patrick's desciptions that he feels what is coming, but prefers not to face it quite yet. Secondly, referring to my last remark, the time of history is epochal, right before the second World War, when the millenia-long midafternoon of finally settled European nations had become, after the First World War, an evening of nostalgic longing for a better time; all the appearances and architectural glories were still in place, but the deep diapasson of world change was already rumbling underground. Fermor catches all of this in his writing - does not make a point of it, but you can feel it in the air - therefore, the book is also a description of history on the move. Thirdly, Patrick is not even twenty years old yet, a very young man traveling on foot alone at a time when nobody in any country set out to do what he succeeded in doing. The welcomes he received and the myriad tales and experiences he encountered would be available only to one so young, treated as a younger son to whom gifts and assistance would invariably be given. Someone older, wealthier ,and traveling by vehicle would never have experienced what he did. Lastly, he is a spectacularly good descriptive writer, with regard to his own encounters and thoughts, and the world around him. Since he bridged both the older and the modern epochs, his education far surpassed almost anyone of his age today, so his ability to link what he saw and the past the preceded it is fantastic. I recommend this book as highly as it possible so to do.

Author Fermor's vocabulary is the best I have encountered. His travel tales rival Mark Twain's. This book should on every English class read list. Buy it or borrow it, you will not be disappointed. The descriptions of 1934 Central Europe are simply awewsome.

The author, a rebellious teen in England, undertakes to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople -- in 1937. This is the second half of his journey, through the Balkans and Danube lands. He has an ear for peoples' opinions, the oddities of Hapsburg imperial goulashes of different ethnicities & religions--most of which would be erased by the coming war. One has the sense of a "last glimpse" of the highly cultivated, varied human landscape of Europe before the war and Cold War divided its peoples.