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After travelling to Hungary from the east with Tim Cope, I am now very slowly coming to it from the west, with Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Unlike some of the other members of this group, I found Tim Cope's book much easier to read. For me, the very long paragraphs of descriptive prose in "A Time of Gifts", and the long, sometimes convoluted, sentences, proved very hard going. This is one book which may have been easier to read in print rather than on my ereader - sometimes I found myself going back over the pages to check where a paragraph actually began. After a while I tended to gloss over those long descriptive passages, no matter how well they were written.
I did enjoy the anecdotes about the people Leigh Fermor met on his journey. Part way through the book it suddenly hit me that I had known a few people like him decades ago, when I was a young university student. Boys studying Classics or the Humanities, drunk with literature, music, art, and full of excitement about new places they had visited, people they had met from different walks of life.
I'll continue reading this, but it will be some time before I reach Hungary from this direction. I've decided I need a break, and I am enjoying reading one of Pat McIntosh's Gil Cunningham mysteries for a change! ("On the Trail of Genghis Khan", on the other hand, I was happy to read straight through.)
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