Customer Reviews

Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York Review Books Classics)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Alhtough I'm Greek American, am not particularly a Grecophile. While in Wash, D.C., a book seller recommended Mani and I got hooked. This is a book that I enjoy so much that I savor it in small pieces - the writing is fine prose, sometimes random, and a somewhat free association but what a feeling for Greece it imparts! Some sections have more details, minutae than one might be able to appreciate, but overall this is an awesome book. Makes one want to adventure travel to this area of remote Greece. The writing has such a fine patina - one can hardly stomach reading magazine travel articles in comparison to this book. Thanks to the person who recommended this book to me. For those interested in Greece, Fermor's books will be especially appreciated.

The NYRB Press has done the world a great service by re-issuing Patrick Leigh Fermor's travel books about his 1939 trek across Europe (A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water) and his stay with the Mani in Greece(The Mani). To call these "travel books" is to understate their value. Fermor is a supremely gifted writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of European history, and traveling with him through Europe on the eve of World War II is an education to equal anything you might pay a university $30,000 a year for. Fermor was a unique and original 20th century spirit -- talented, curious, intelligent, adventurous, brave and much more. He not only wrote and traveled, he inserted himself into the nexus of the war and carried out spy missions and acts of bravery that showed he was a man of action and conviction as well as a man of ideas.

Anyone who loves words and loves to learn deserves to experience his books. Please do yourself this favor.

What a marvelous book! And written by a true, heroic genius. Fermor, a still living legend, seems to have disdained self-promotion, but upon reading a few pages of this book, you realize you have encountered a rare individual.

First, his writing. Encyclopedic, detailed, sensual, and imaginative. It exemplifies the finest characteristics of travel writing, and best of all, he explores a remote, largely unknown and distinct region of the world, the Mani. This area is a fine example of the fierce, independent Greek spirit. Fermor chronicles it through a bold exploration with his companion and future wife, Joan.

He understands the Greek mindset exquisitely well. The author is a gifted, self-taught linguist, and it is apparent that he concentrates on listening and observing intensely, then transforming his experiences into fascinating, readable prose. He comprehends the heart of the Greek people, and conveys it with an extensive knowledge of history.

Critiques? His fertile mind is so hungry that he tends to over-describe. Better to allow the reader the pleasure of using his or her imagination than recording every little detail with brilliant metaphors. You could also say he rambles, but that is common with travel writers.

Conclusion? A classic, but like most classics, not an entirely easy read. In the end, extremely worthwhile reading.

Reviewed by David Lundberg, author of Olympic Wandering: Time Travel Through Greece

Do you love poetry, or, to be more precise, wildly poetic prose? Do you have a deep-seated love of etymology, so much so that a phrase spoken at random will send you off into a wild linguistic reverie on the history of tongues? Above all, do you have a powerful, almost overwhelming sense of place that puts you in touch with a vast sprawling history before your inner eye? If so, you will absolutely fall in love with this book, as I did. For it is, as Fermor puts it in his Preface, "the opposite of a guide book." And thank whatever gods may be that this is so!

Let me give two illustrative examples to whet the prospective reader's appetite:

Towards the beginning, Fermor and his future wife Joan encounter a fisherman mending his nets in the early morning and begin consuming a bottle of ouzo. "There is a special delight in this early-morning drinking in Greece." And for the next seven pages one is transported into a fantasia of the past ignited by the conversation with the fisherman and, of course, his ouzo:

"...the whole of Constantinople seemed to be rising on a dazzling golden cloud and the central dome began to revolve as the redoubled clangour of the Byzantines hoisted it aloft. Loud with bells and gongs, with cannon flashing from the walls and a cloud-borne fleet firing long crimson radii of Greek fire, the entire visionary city, turning in faster and faster spirals, sailed to a blinding and unconjecturable zenith... The bottle was empty...We stepped out into the sobering glare of noon."

Finally, and pre-eminently, let me quote Fermor towards the end as to why he is enraptured by these Greek hinterlands, their people and their language. It is a sense I've had quite often regarding places I've visited, and anyone who has had a similar experience will recognise it instantly:

"Animate and inanimate objects, on ikon and church wall and mountain-side, have the same spiritual effect, the same mystical and animistic aura of immanence. No wonder the Greeks of all centuries have populated these hills with a magical fauna and a dramatis personae and a pantheon...These characteristics have a strange effect on the Greek landscape. Nature becomes supernatural; the frontier between physical and metaphysical is confounded."

So, Go! Read! Confound your frontiers!

What else can be said of this magnificent book--except that? There are two features that recommend the book, and both of them are a very big deal. Firstly, Fermor writes beautifully--much of the book, most of it really, is quite simply a sort of poetry. Almost the entire book is nothing less than a kind of prose poem to Greece, about Greece. Here are a couple of samples:

"[We] watched the sun westering towards Yerolimena. Again there was this miracle of innumerable gold splinters sown over the sea. Directly below the sun they gathered into a wide gold sheet, flaking away in fragments and ripples as the water approached the shore and turning purple and grass-green among the teeth of rocks a long way beneath our cliff....The coast rose and fell westwards to the gulf of Yerolimena where the sea was on fire. It rose and fell for a few miles to the east, then turned south to the darkening last blue peninsula of Taenarus."

And: "The slow fall of the evening among this smashed and scattered masonry, the decrescendo and then the silence of the cicadas, the wide unruffled gleam of the sea below and the nerve-stilling quietness of the air, hold a different message. A spell of peace lives in the ruins of ancient Greek temples. As the traveler leans back among the fallen capitals and allows the hours to pass, it empties the mind of troubling thoughts and anxieties and slowly refills it, like a vessel that has been drained and scoured, with a quiet ecstasy. Nearly all that has happened fades to a limbo of shadows and insignificance and is painlessly replaced by an intimation of radiance, simplicity and calm which unties all knots and solves all riddles and seems to murmur a benevolent and unimperious suggestion that the whole of life, if it were allowed to unfold without hindrance or compulsion or search for alien solutions, might be limitlessly happy."

Passages like the above can be found almost at random throughout the volume. However, it would be totally misleading to say that "This is a travel book about Greece by an extremely skillful writer." And this brings us to outstanding feature number two, which is that Fermor knows the land that he writes about so fully and so intimately. And "knowing" here is not so much "mental" (although he certainly knows it on that level), but in the very cells & molecules of his body; it comes out in his sweat (and there is a lot of that!), it pervades his whole body & being, and nowhere more powerfully than in his heart. He obviously loves this place, and, so powerful is the total impact of his narrative, he makes us love it too.

I should also note that this particular volume concerns travels in the Mani, an area in the far south of the Peloponnese. The people living here, and the geography as well, are singular & distinctive; but in a deeper sense, both the land & the people of the Mani possess, in common with the famous larger entity of which the Mani is a part, that extraordinary, signature DNA which is Greece, Hellas. Fermor does not, I suppose, conjure up the entirety of that unique double helix, but he sure comes close.

It's a wonderful book.

Mani is one of the most memorable books I've ever read; I'd never seen anything like it before. It is made up of the sort of beautiful, literate, intelligent prose which (sadly) you'll never find on the New York Times Bestseller List. The reader is taken on a wonderful, magical journey which few of us, even if we visited the same places, would be gifted enough to experience so richly. But beware! Reading this book will infect you with an incurable desire to visit Greece yourself.

In this entertaining book, Leigh Fermor describes his travels in the Mani peninsula, the southernmost and at the time of his writing, one of the least developed parts of continental Greece. Like some of his other books, this book describes a traditional society that was disappearing at the time of his writing. Mani combines some brilliant descriptive writing, particularly with respect to landscapes, keen social observation, and a series of historical asides inspired by his travels. All of these components are individually compelling and the quality of writing is unusually good. There are times, however, when some of Leigh Fermor's asides tend to overpower the primary narrative which tends to disrupt the narrative flow.

For years I've had this volume and for years I've been hearing/reading about what a great writer Fermor is. Well, it's all true, he is terrific and the book fulfills all my expectations and then some.

Curiously, I'm reading Flaubert's Salammbo at the same time and I'm struck by the tendency of each to catalog the fantastic, Flaubert with his imagination the likes of which I've never read, and Fermor with his encyclopeic erudition the likes of which I've seldom read before -- if ever.

An education, a trip, a delight; get it.

I'll just defer to the other reviewers on this page since their views of this wonderful book agree with mine. Fermor is a treasure. I've read all of his books and enjoyed them.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was an Englishman (in 2004 he was knighted) who loved Greece and lived almost half of his 96 years there. He is the author of a handful of travel books that many regard to be among the best ever written in English. Appropriately, two of them concern Greece, including this one from 1958, MANI: TRAVELS IN THE SOUTHERN PELOPONNESE.

The Mani is the southernmost peninsula of mainland Greece, jutting into the Mediterranean and separating the Gulf of Messenia and the Gulf of Laconia. Essentially, it is a mountain range (the Taygetus, which climbs up to 8,000 feet) bounded on both sides by the sea. The Mani is extraordinarily rugged and it is remote, two characteristics that have dictated that it usually was the last frontier for whatever waves of civilization, culture, or political rule swept over Greece.

The book MANI is structured around a several-week trip Leigh Fermor and his future wife Joan took around the peninsula in the mid-1950s. In vivid, often dazzling, prose Leigh Fermor describes the sights and people he encountered in as rewarding a fashion as one might want from a travel writer. With few exceptions, the Maniots he met were weathered, hardy, very hospitable, and endearing.

But MANI is much more than a travelogue. It also is a work of history, mythology, and cultural anthropology that focuses on the Mani but often spills over to much of the rest of Greece. For me, there is too much recondite discussion of such sundry subjects as headgear through the centuries; nereids, gorgons, centaurs, and other "supernatural riff-raff"; the history and evolution of ikons; and the etymological sources for Greek maritime terms and the winds in Greece. The book is positively baroque in its encyclopedic splendor.

Leigh Fermor develops his points leisurely and thoroughly. MANI is not a book for the impatient reader. But, in addition to its erudition, it is distinguished - redeemed, even - by lush and imaginative writing, such as this description of sailing along the coast near the tip of the peninsula:

"As the caique sailed further east, village after village turned its sunlit walls to us. They seemed to be suspended in the air to glow and flash there like the lusters of chandeliers. A headland rose and hid them and as we sailed past the little gulf of Marmari the sun was already high in the limitless Greek sky: a sky which is higher and lighter and which surrounds one closer and stretches further into space than anywhere else in the world. It is neither daunting nor belittling but hospitable and welcoming to man and as much his element as the earth; as though a mere error in gravity pins him to the rocks or the ship's deck and prevents him from being assumed into infinity."