Barely a Book Club #11: All Was Frozen
A guilt-free winterlude.
It is, or is not, the late winter (not easy to tell in this part of the world/era of human existence), and we're still reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, our fourth Barely a Book Club selection.
A founding principle of this club is that the experience be low-pressure, low-demand, chill, even, so I'm not going to beat myself up too much for drawing it out. A Time of Gifts is a rich feast. However long it takes, it takes.
I want to share a passage I read this morning. I liked it so much that I read it to my young daughter, who seemed to appreciate it, or at least did a good job of humouring me. (Regardless, it reminded me of how nice it is to read out loud, to perform somebody else's writing with your own voice, to really taste it.) Fermor is nearing the end of his walk through Germany, close to the Austrian border. He writes:
All was frozen. There was a particular delight in treading across the hard puddles. The grey discs and pods of ice creaked under hobnails and dogs with a mysterious sigh of captive air: then they split into stars and whitened as the spiders-web fissures expanded. Outside the villages the telegraph wire was a single cable of flakes interrupted by birds alighting and I would follow the path below and break through the new and sparkling crust to sink in powdery depths. I travelled on footpaths and over stiles and across fields and along country roads that ran through dark woods and out again into the white ploughland and pasture. The valleys were dotted with villages that huddled round the shingle roofs of churches, and all the belfries tapered and then swelled again into black ribbed cupolas. These onion-domes had a fleetingly Russian look. Otherwise, especially when the bare hardwoods were replaced by conifers, the décor belonged to Grimms' Fairy Tales. "Once upon a time, on the edge of a dark forest, there lived an old woodman, with a single beautiful daughter," it was that sort of a region. Cottages that looked as innocent as cuckoo-clocks turned into witches' ginger-bread after dark. Deep and crusted loads of snow weighed the conifer-branches to the ground. When I touched them with the tip of my new walking stick, up they sprang in sparkling explosions.
The older I get, the more I like the winter. I hope we get to keep it.
Now, some of you have been more diligent than I am and have already crossed the finish line. One such is BABC reader Clare Bruff, who wrote a terrific blog post about A Time of Gifts that got to the heart of why I'm loving this book so much.
She's graciously given me permission to quote her here:
Leigh Fermor's time in Vienna was of particular interest to me, coinciding as it did with a moment in Vienna that already interested me. The Vienna of my imagination comes from Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, was home to Freud and Elias Canetti. 1934, the year Leigh Fermor arrived in Vienna, was the same year Stefan Zweig left it. Freud stayed on another 4 years, but he should have left earlier: Marie Bonaparte essentially paid a ransom for him to allow him to escape. During his time in Vienna, Leigh Fermor observes,
The high proportion of foreign names demonstrated the inheritance of the Hapsburg Empire at its widest expansion. Many subjects of alien race, finding their regional capitals too narrow for them, streamed to the glittering Kaiserstadt: Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles, Italians, Jews from the whole of Central and Eastern Europe and every variety of Southern Slav.
Reading this, I think of Joseph Roth coming to Vienna for his education after a childhood in what is now Western Ukraine, or the Ladino-speaking Elias Canetti, born in present-day Bulgaria, who spent part of his childhood in Vienna and returned there to go to university, staying – like Freud – until 1938. The chapter in A Time of Gifts about Vienna is infused with everything he didn't understand when he was there, but which the Leigh Fermor who was writing the book 40 years later knew lay just beneath the surface.
Now that's what I call an incentive to keep reading onwards to Vienna and beyond! I hope you will too. Please share your own experiences of reading A Time of Gifts in the comments below or by replying to this email.
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