The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor | Language: English | ISBN:
B00F1W07FU | Format: EPUB
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos Description
In the winter of 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick (“Paddy”) Leigh Fermor set out on a walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took him almost a year. Decades later, Leigh Fermor told the story of that life-changing journey in
A Time of Gifts and
Between the Woods and the Water, two books now celebrated as among the most vivid, absorbing, and beautifully written travel books of all time.
The Broken Road is the long-awaited account of the final leg of his youthful adventure that Leigh Fermor promised but was unable to finish before his death in 2011. Assembled from Leigh Fermor’s manuscripts by his prizewinning biographer Artemis Cooper and the travel writer Colin Thubron, this is perhaps the most personal of all Leigh Fermor’s books, catching up with young Paddy in the fall of 1934 and following him through Bulgaria and Romania to the coast of the Black Sea. Days and nights on the road, spectacular landscapes and uncanny cities, friendships lost and found, leading the high life in Bucharest or camping out with fishermen and shepherds–in the
The Broken Road such incidents and escapades are described with all the linguistic bravura, odd and astonishing learning, and overflowing exuberance that Leigh Fermor is famous for, but also with a melancholy awareness of the passage of time, especially when he meditates on the scarred history of the Balkans or on his troubled relations with his father. The book ends, perfectly, with Paddy’s arrival in Greece, the country he would fall in love with and fight for. Throughout it we can still hear the ringing voice of an irrepressible young man embarking on a life of adventure.
- File Size: 2830 KB
- Print Length: 385 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1590177541
- Publisher: New York Review Books (March 4, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00F1W07FU
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,601 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Specific Groups > Adventurers & Explorers - #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Travel - #22
in Books > Travel > Europe > General
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Specific Groups > Adventurers & Explorers - #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Travel - #22
in Books > Travel > Europe > General
A broken repast, some scattered crumbs, some morsels missing and forgotten, some condiments lacking ... but still a feast! After a thirty year wait, Paddy's readers finally get to read the third volume of his planned series; recounting his youthful walk from England to Constantinople. Re-constructed from works he never finished editing, morsels of recovered diaries and letters, the volume, loving compiled by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper (what sterling editors) concludes, in an honorable way, the intention of the author.
Here again we hear that distinctive voice recount the joys and confusions of his youthful search for knowledge, experience that same dramatic contrasts between sleeping many weeks in the bone-chilling cold of smoky peasant cots with golden respites in the castles and chauffeur driven stays with the old, and already dying-out aristocratic of the olden Mittel-Europe.
The final chapter has echoes of the "Time for Silence" and "Mani" books that gloriously emerged from his later wanders in Greece and is extracted from one of the few diaries (The Green Diary) that survived his war-time exploits and the European ravages of the decades after his trip.
If it is perhaps true that this "broken" and unpolished volume is not the best introduction to the trilogy, it certainly is a vibrant and tempting overture to his subsequent writing in Greece. A wonderful, rich read.
By John the Reader
I unknowingly did some of the Fermor trek in the mid-'70's, although at that time few had heard of him, and I suspect none in the Boomer cohort. Certainly we would have idealized him in spirit, had we known. As I was newly out of the military, not particularly an outstanding academic, intent on being a writer, the connection would have been even stronger.
As I have read more, and more, and more about Fermor, including many of the less complimentary comments in parts of the British press, he has evolved; less idealized, more complex, less compelling. He certainly seems to have treated his wife like s***, and freely sponged off everyone at a world-class level. A frequently drunken, perennnially unemployed lecher, who also proved to be a writer with few equals: Indeed a "dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness." For greater detail on his life, a search on 'paris review fermor' should take you to 'A Visit with Patrick Leigh Fermor' by the Paris Review.
The first two are brilliant, almost defining their own class. So then, what to make of this one, how can you not fall under the Fermor charm? This last one, as others have observed, is much less smooth and polished. I think that's as it should be, and I have to wonder if he didn't have that in mind all along. Facing a reality he didn't have the will to romanticize, deciding to leave us struggling with a different Fermor. He'd have liked it that way, plus it appealed to his lazy side. The rest of us will just have to be content with what he left us, and I suspect he had that in mind as well.
By Marshal Berthier
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