Description
Many years after his travel, Leigh Fermor's diary of the Danubian leg of his journey was found in a castle in Romania and returned to him. He used it in his writing of the book, which also drew on the knowledge he had accumulated in the intervening years. Having the diary enabled him to express the excitement of a young man's encounters and discoveries.
In the book, he conveys the immediacy of an 18-year-old's reactions to a great adventure, deepened by the retrospective reflections of the cultured and sophisticated man of the world which he became. He travelled in Europe before the Communists had taken over the East, when monarchies survived in the Balkans, and remnants of the old regimes were to be seen in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In Germany Hitler had recently come to power but most of his abuses were not yet evident.
Leigh Fermor's knowledge of European history, art and culture gives his work a deep basis. It is much more than a travelogue. He conveys the characters of an array of people, from the inhabitants of workers' hostels to down-on-their luck Austrian counts at home in their castles. He writes how the landscapes and the human physical types he encountered were familiar from the Dutch and German masters.
Read more about this topic: A Time Of Gifts
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