Book Review: A Time of Gifts
I will start off saying that this book, A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, is not for everyone. In order to appreciate this book (and I’m not saying that I was able to appreciate it to anywhere near its fullest potential) you need to have an excellent grasp of and love for the English language. You also need to have a fondness for the quirks of history, the beauty of the countryside, an appreciation of literature, and a keen interest in times gone by. If this at all describes you though, you’ll enjoy this book immensely. I wish I had a better knowledge of European geography, peoples, and literature - particularly that of Eastern Europe - because I know I would have enjoyed this book even more if that had been the case. This is a book that revealed to me the banality and superficiality of my Bachelor of Arts in History - something I was beginning to suspect but has now been firmly confirmed. *sigh* It isn’t entirely their fault, I wasn’t exactly a student who put my all into my work.
But enough with the self-flagellation this evening and onto a couple passages I thought I would share to give a small flavor of the book. To set the stage: The author is a young man who decides to walk from Holland to Constantinople in 1933. He does this because he’s been kicked out of various schools and decided against joining the peacetime military and can’t quite think of what else to do with himself. The first quote comes fairly early on in the book, when he describes how he would keep himself entertained as he walked through the German fields by reciting everything he’s ever memorized. The list is quite prodigious (especially compared to my own, which wold mainly consist of nursery rhymes, Broadway musicals, and Ani DiFranco lyrics, the later of which I can’t even listen to anymore and generally find irritating when it floats to the top of the flotsam of my brain) and I thought this bit at the end was excellent.
Song is universal in Germany; it causes no dismay; Shuffle off to Buffalo; Bye, Bye, Blackbird; or Shenandoah; or The Raggle Taggle Gypsies sung as I moved along, evoked nothing but tolerant smiles. But verse was different. Murmuring on the highway caused raised eyebrows and a look of anxious pity. Passages, uttered with gestures and sometimes quite loud, provoked, of one was caught in the act, stares of alarm. Regulus brushing the delaying populace aside as he headed for the Carthaginian executioner, as though to Lacedaemonian Tarentum or the Venafrian fields, called for a fairly mild flourish; but urging the assault-party at Harfleur to close the wall up with English dead would automatically bring on a heightened pitch of voice and action and double one’s embarrassment if caught. When this happened I would try to taper off in a cough or weave the words into a tuneless hum and reduce all the gestures to a feint at hair tidying. But some passages demand an empty road as far as the eye can see before letting fly. The terrible boxing-match, for instance, at the funeral games of Anchises when Entellus sends Dares reeling and spitting blood and teeth across the Sicilian shore - ‘ore ejectantem mixtosque in sanguine dentes’! - and then, with his thonged fist, scatters the steer’s brains with one blow between the horns - this needs care. As for the sword-thrust at the bridge-head that brings the great lord Luna crashing among the augurs like an oak-tree on Mount Alvernus - here the shouts, the walking-stick slashes, the staggering gait and the arms upflung should never be indulged if there is anyone within miles, if then. to a strange eye, one is drunk or a lunatic.
So it was today. I was at this very moment of crescendo and climax, when an old woman tottered out of a wood where she had been gathering sticks. Dropping and scattering them, she took to her heels. I would have liked the earth to have swallowed me, or to have been plucked into the clouds.
The next passage is very different in tone, and shows how foreign this Europe he was traipsing through is when compared to the Europe that has seen another World War and the rise and fall of communism (not to mention the beginnings of our new global age). Here the author is in the newly made Republic of Czechoslovakia and walking the streets of Bratislava.
Wandering in the back-lanes on the second day I was there, I went into a lively drinking-hall with the Magyar word VENDEGLO painted in large letters across the front pane and bumped into a trio of Hungarian farmers. Enmeshed in smoke and the fumes of plum-brandy with paprika-pods sizzling on the charcoal, they were hiccuping festive dactyls to each other and unsteadily clinking their tenth thimblefuls of palinka: vigorous, angular-faced, dark-clad and dark-glanced men with black moustaches tipped down at the corners of their mouths. Their white shirts were buttoned at the throat. They wore low-crowned black hats with narrow brims and high boots of shiny black leather with a Hessian notch at the knee. Hunnish whips were looped about their wrists. They might have just dismounted after sacking the palace of the Morovian kral.
My next call, only a few doors away, was a similar haunt of sawdust and spilt liquor and spit, but, this time, KRCMA was daubed over the window. All was Slav within. The tow-haired Slovaks drinking there were dressed in conical fleece hats and patched sheepskin-jerkins with the matted wool turned inwards. They were shod in canoe-shaped cowhide moccasins. Their shanks, cross-gartered with uncured thongs, were bulbously swaddled in felt that would only be unwrapped in the spring. Swamp-and-conifer men they looked, with faces tundra-blank and eyes as blue and as vague as unmapped lakes which the plum-brandy was misting over. But they might just as well have been swallowing hydromel a thousand years earlier, before setting off to track the cloven spoor of the aurochs across a frozen Trans-Carpathian bog.
I wonder what happened to these people in all that was to come in the ensuing years? Reading his descriptions of cities like Vienna and Munich - cities I’ve visited - was amazing and heartbreaking because they very well might have been completely different cities. 75 years separate us, but in that period of time Europe has been unmade, remade, and remade again.
