His friend Bruce Chatwin, whose In Patagonia was published the same year – 1977 – found the style a little too much and wished he had pared it back, however, Leigh Fermor felt the reverse about Chatwin’s debut work : The writing is crammed with images and observations, as if the memories kept on crowding onto the pen as he set them down on the page. Leigh Fermor is able to sketch such a vivid word portrait of a place and the people in it, that passage after passage had me smiling as I read. From the introductory letter to Xan Fielding and the first chapter where the author recounts setting off from a rain-slicked London, it’s clear that this is going to be something special. The book follows the author on a journey he made in 1933 (the year Hitler came to power) some forty plus years before he wrote it – walking from Rotterdam to Constantinople.

Now that I have, rather than regret not having discovered it sooner, I’d like to thank my younger self for not doing it sooner, allowing me instead to revel in the experience now.

However, I kept not quite getting around to opening up a copy to actually read it.

Recently this happened to me as I finally got around to reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and as I plunged in, it felt like meeting an old friend.įor years, via an early-twenties obsession with Bruce Chatwin and a long-standing liking for books involving long walks – such as Laurie Lee’s I walked out one midsummer morning, I had been dimly aware of Leigh Fermor’s work and had the feeling that I might enjoy it. I remember handling paperback copies and noticing John Craxton’s cover illustrations on several occasions over the years since at least the 1980s, when helping-out in my Mum’s bookshop in Bristol and later working in The Gloucester Road Bookshop in London in the mid 1990s. One day you will read the book that’s been nagging at you and when you do open the first page, then turn the next and the next, and on and on as you are drawn in, you’ll wonder what took you so long. They haunt your days appearing in bookshop window displays, in people’s hands on trains, or in review section round-ups of the books the literary world wants the rest of us to know it has been reading. “For now the time of gifts is gone, O boys that grow, O snows that melt.” Louis MacNeiceĪs a reader, some books are inevitable.

Fermor a time of gifts