Barely a Book Club #10: A Time of Gifts
The holidays are upon us and the year is nearly over, but I did not want to see 2023 out without a last dispatch to kick off our fourth selection: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travel memoir A Time of Gifts. I have been reading this book with a sense of giddy exhilaration all week and I can’t wait to share it with you. It is an ominous, rollicking good time. Consider it my holiday gift to you, treasured readers.
The story goes like this: in 1933, an 18-year-old Fermor, who had been expelled from boarding school for holding hands with a local girl, decided to walk from the Hook of Holland (a port town in the country’s southwest) to what was then Constantinople. His meanderings took him through a Europe on the very precipice of calamity, and his writing is a snapshot of a lost, and ultimately doomed world.
But he would not tell this story for another some 45 years. Fermor went off to war, and his exploits were truly incredible—posing as a shepherd on Crete for years while organizing local partisan forces, eventually kidnapping Nazi Major General Heinrich Kriepe—and did not return to the subject of his long walk until the late 1970s, when he published A Time of Gifts to wide acclaim. It might not have happened at all if not for the incredible discovery of his original travel journal in a “Moldavian estate” belonging to Fermor’s ex-girlfriend, the Princess Balaşa Cantacuzène, in 1965. The fact that it survived at all is a small miracle, and we would not have A Time of Gifts and its two follow-up volumes, without it. (Also miraculous is the fact that you can peruse a scanned version of the diary here at the National Library of Scotland.)
I’ve always been fascinated with what it must have been like to travel without the great industrial superstructure of tourism breathing down your neck. Pleasure travel goes back millennia, and British people have swanned around Europe taking in the sights since at least the 1600s, but as an industry it’s only become inescapable since the birth of cheap airfare, package vacations, college kids with summers to waste and spare money. Fermor describes sleeping in haylofts, in small town jails, catching barges downriver in a way that seems unimaginable now. But the essence of travelling solo, of waking up on your own in a new place and feeling your mind reinvigorated by strangeness, of making fast, close friends and opening up to them in a way with an ease you never thought possible; Fermor captures these feelings so perfectly and relatably.
Disclosure: as somebody who backpacked across Europe at the age of 19, starting in the Netherlands, my thumb may be on the scale here. And the Europe I zipped around by train was far from the storm-clouded continent of 1933. Fermor takes in the swastikas, the drunken brownshirts and describes them with equanimity, not over-weighting his descriptions with portent; he leaves that to us, and the book is better for it.
I have so much to say about this book and I am myself only a few chapters deep. I will leave it to you as a holiday treat (lots of good Christmas content in it), and with this, from Something Good patron saint Jan Morris, who blessed the NYRB edition with an introduction, bringing this book club full circle as we conclude its first year:
It is one of the fascinations of A Time of Gifts that its journey is in effect evoked for us by two people: the carefree young dropout who experienced it, and stored it up in memory and diary, and the immensely experienced author who, knowing more about history forty years later, turned it into art.
I’ll be back in the New Year with more posts about this very special book, and I invite you to chime in about it in the comments below as you read along.
Did you know that I am running a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders? Did you know that if you donate any amount of money to this worthy cause at my fundraising page and send me an email, I will then send you, at my own expense, a set of these gorgeous bookplates designed by James Braithwaite? We are close to meeting our year-end goal of $4,000 and I would greatly appreciate it if you could help out. This is a free newsletter, an absolute labour of love for me, but if you’ve ever wanted to help support it, this would be how.
(No worries if money is tight and you can’t afford to give this year. If you are one of the many people affected by recent layoffs, I would be more than happy to send you some bookplates either way. Email me.)
Thanks for being part of our book club, and I hope you’ll keep reading along next year. As always, please try and source your copy from an independent bookstore if at all possible.
If you have any comments or suggestions for future reading, please drop ‘em in the comments section below. Otherwise, happy hols and see you in the New Year!
