I absolutely loved this book. The writing and atmosphere were both superb and had me in a sort of a trance as I read. One specific uniqueness to this book that I so loved was that it was a mixture of genuine youthful energy, naivety, curiosity and zest for life mixed with the genuine nostalgia, reflectiveness, and sometimes wistful melancholy of an older person looking back on his life, which I thought an intoxicating mixture.
There are so many different wonderful scenes, and some had me laughing, especially the woman at the end of this one:
Spoiler:
“Song is universal in Germany; it causes no dismay; Shuffle off to Buffalo; Bye, Bye, Blackbird; or Shenandoah; or The Raggle Taggle Gypsies sung as I moved along, evoked nothing but tolerant smiles. But verse was different. Murmuring on the highway caused raised eyebrows and a look of anxious pity. Passages, uttered with gestures and sometimes quite loud, provoked, if one was caught in the act, stares of alarm. Regulus brushing the delaying populace aside as he headed for the Carthaginian executioner, as though to Lacedaemonian Tarentum or the Venafrian fields, called for a fairly mild flourish; but urging the assault-party at Harfleur to close the wall up with English dead would automatically bring on a heightened pitch of voice and action and double one’s embarrassment if caught. When this happened I would try to taper off in a cough or weave the words into a tuneless hum and reduce all gestures to a feint at hair-tidying. But some passages demand an empty road as far as the eye can see before letting fly. The terrible boxing-match, for instance, at the funeral games of Anchises when Entellus sends Dares reeling and spitting blood and teeth across the Sicilian shore—‘ore ejectantem mixtosque in sanguine dentes’!—and then, with his thonged fist, scatters a steer’s brains with one blow between the horns—this needs care. As for the sword-thrust at the bridgehead that brings the great lord of Luna crashing among the augurs like an oak-tree on Mount Alvernus—here the shouts, the walking-stick slashes, the staggering gait and the arms upflung should never be indulged if there is anyone within miles, if then. To a strange eye, one is drunk or a lunatic.
So it was today. I was at this very moment of crescendo and climax, when an old woman tottered out of a wood where she had been gathering sticks. Dropping and scattering them, she took to her heels. I would have liked the earth to have swallowed me, or to have been plucked into the clouds.”
Fermor’s sketchings-for-money escapades with Konrad were also divine and Konrad was such a character.
Sometimes Fermor’s descriptions were so evocative and tinged with imagination or even flights of fancy:
Spoiler:
“Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in the tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures...a widowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.”
I think the older Fermor realised better than the younger Fermor his youthful personality:
Quote:
Originally Posted by ccowie
I did find it a little eerie to read about his travels knowing full well what was about to transpire in that area of the world. There was scene in the book (can’t seem to find it now) where he was with some new friends in a restaurant or eating outside and he was confronted by some brownshirts. He seemed a little stymied by the situation. I hope I’m remembering this correctly. It reminded me a little of the movie Cabaret, which I haven’t seen in about 25 years, but where the backdrop of WWII provided a dark shadow over a lot of mundane details of people’s lives who just weren’t waking up to the gravity of the situation.
|
Cabaret is one of my favourite films. The film and stage musical, and earlier play and film entitled ‘I Am a Camera”, are all based on a 1939 book by Christopher Isherwood entitled “The Berlin Stories”. Though a novel (made up of two novellas actually), it’s somewhat autobiographical and the male protagonist of Cabaret played by Michael York is loosely based on Isherwood. An interesting bit of trivia is that in reality, “Sally” was English, but her nationality became American for the film.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamlet53
This book also left me with a deep feeling of nostalgia, but for a time I could never have experienced. The instances of reliance on the kindness of strangers that would not fly today abound. Drinking oneself unconscious in a bar and the result being the owner carrying one up to a room to spend the night? Try being tossed into the street, perhaps after having first being rolled by some other barfly. Being able to sleep in a cell at the local police station? Only if under arrest. They might offer directions to the local homeless shelter, and you better be in line for a spot there by 3:00. The town mayor offering any visitor money for food and lodging? Get real. It was a time of gifts back then indeed. 
One other comment on this. I do wonder if Fermor's experience would have been the same and would the idea of such a journey have been possible even back then for a working class English youth? Would the father of an old school friend been willing, or even able, in 1933 to lend Fermor 15 pounds to get him started on his journey. Would his reception throughout Europe been the same as a wandering lower-class 18-year old with the corresponding level of education? |
Interesting question; I think his experiences were very unique even for the time. Fermor had a perfect storm of means, intelligence, opportunity, position, exuberance, willingness and charm.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ClareK
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.
|
Wonderful description!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl
…Often looking at images or reading a bit of historical background was the key to unlocking that passage for me and to capture my interest again. Definitely images greatly enhanced my appreciation of this book. I want to take a trip to Austria now! |
For better or worse, I’ve become a bit of a Google addict when reading. Every little thing that interests me or piques my curiosity when reading, I often Google. It enhances the reading so much, but of course it does slow it down as well. Because of that, I’ve actually been trying to reduce my amout of Googles!
Quote:
Originally Posted by paola
…Yes, drunk is the word - but what struck me is how much more naive Fermor is when it comes to politics: there are many quite crude generalizations (the checks, the slavs, and so on, let alone the gipsies) which I found quite out of tune with the rest of the narrative.
|
I agree, and I’ll go one step further - I actually felt as I was reading as if his younger self had possibly been even cruder, and his older self writing had “cleaned it up” a bit knowing how it’d sound. But for his older self to include some crudeness without comment speaks to his older self as well. I think even his older and more aware self was still a product of his time though and for me those instances in the writing are forgivable.
It is interesting how he can be crude in some descriptions yet so very tactful in others, such as his playful and wry yet utterly respectful and even laudatory description of his evening with Frau Hubner, “a born monolinguist”:
Spoiler:
I soon knew all about their children, and their illnesses and bereavements and joys. This staunchless monologue treated of everyday, even humdrum matters but the resilience and the style of the telling saved it from any trace of dullness. It needed neither prompting nor response, nothing beyond an occasional nod, a few deprecating clicks of the tongue, or an assenting smile. Once, when she asked rhetorically, and with extended hands: “So what was I to do?,” I tried to answer, a little confusedly, as I had lost the thread. But my words were drowned in swelling tones: “There was only one thing to do! I gave that umbrella away next morning to the first stranger I could find! I couldn’t keep it in the house, not after what had happened. And it would have been a pity to burn it...” Arguments were confronted and demolished, condemnations and warnings uttered with the lifting of an admonitory forefinger. Comic and absurd experiences, as she recalled them, seemed to take possession of her: at first, with the unsuccessful stifling of a giggle, then leaning back with laughter until finally she rocked forward with her hands raised and then slapped on her knees in the throes of total hilarity while her tears flowed freely. She would pull herself together, dabbing at her cheeks and straightening her dress and her hair with deprecating self-reproof. A few minutes later, tragedy began to build up; there would be a catch in her voice: “...and next morning all seven goslings were dead, laid out in a row. All seven! They were the only things that poor old man still cared about!” She choked back sobs at the memory until sniffs and renewed dabs with her handkerchief and the self-administered consolations of philosophy came to the rescue and launched her on a fresh sequence.”
…
“Her soliloquy flowed on as voluminously as the Danube under her window, and the most remarkable aspect of it was the speaker’s complete and almost hypnotic control of her listener. Following her raptly, I found myself, with complete sincerity, merrily laughing, then puckering my brows in commiseration, and a few minutes later, melting in sympathetic sorrow, and never quite sure why. I was putty in her hands.”
…
“At last she saw I was nodding, and broke off with a repentant cry of self-accusation. I was sorry, as I could have gone on listening for ever.”
Quote:
Originally Posted by fantasyfan
A fact that cannot be avoided is that the author clearly is remembering those things that he wishes to remember while forgetting those things he wishes to forget. The result--as Ccowie pointed out--is a tendency to present a narrative deeply coloured by Fermor's later retrospective musings on the entire adventure.
|
Very well put!