The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (NYRB Classics)

One of the landmarks of travel literature is Patrick Leigh Fermor's three-volume account of his 1934 trek across Europe as a nineteen-year-old. To be sure, though, to characterize the books as "travel literature" may do them a disservice, both because they eclipse almost all other representatives of the genre and because they are much more than a travelogue. PLF mixes in history and ethnology in such an engaging and informative fashion that the books are sui generis.The first two volumes, which I have also reviewed on Amazon, are "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water". The second one ended with PLF at the Iron Gates, a gorge on the Danube River between Serbia and Rumania. In THE BROKEN ROAD, PLF resumes his journey through portions of Rumania and much of Bulgaria, crisscrossing that country three times. He travels mostly on foot, sometimes sleeping rough; sometimes staying with shepherds, gypsies, or farmers; sometimes with friends he makes along the way; and on a few occasions with the upper crust.One of the more memorable lodgings was at the "Savoi-Ritz" in Bucharest. When he came upon it, he thought it a small hotel, "about my level, in spite of its daunting name." It turned out to be a brothel and entertaining indeed is PLF's account of late-night, after-work dinner with the five girls of the establishment -- one from Bukovina, a Moldavian, a Transylvanian, a German from a town in the Carpathian passes, and a Gagauz from the Dobrudja ("I gazed at her with the reverence of an ornithologist at the glimpse of an Auckland Island merganser"). Another night was spent with six Bulgarian shepherds and four Greek fishermen in a cave along an isolated inlet of the Black Sea on the coast of Bulgaria. Against a crackling wood fire, PLF witnessed several soulful folk dances, fueled by the raki that PLF had carried in his rucksack. At the opposite end of the spectrum, while staying at the apartment of a German diplomat in Rumania PLF went to a dinner party for Artur Rubinstein, where the great pianist played Chopin after which there broke out "dancing and drinking at an uninhibited tempo".What helps make THE BROKEN ROAD and its two predecessors special is that PLF wrote them, contemplatively, forty to sixty years after the journey itself, with the benefit of the intervening years of life lessons and much scholarship. This gives him greater perspective as well as the opportunity to interlace the story of his travels with fascinating information about the history and the peoples of the places he visits. One small example, this one of the hatred between the Bulgars and the Byzantines: "The hatred is epitomized on either side by the act of one Byzantine emperor, Basil the Bulgar-slayer, who totally blinded a captured Bulgarian army of ten thousand men, leaving a single eye to each hundredth soldier so that the rest might grope their way home to the [Bulgarian] czar: a spectacle so atrocious that the czar, when the pathetic procession arrived, died of grief and shock."PLF's prose is rather baroque in its intricacies, and his vocabulary is prodigious. He is prone to elaborate lists and flights of fancy, both of which are evident in his account of when, while trudging along a railway, the Orient Express suddenly appears out of the darkness and whisks past him, setting him to thinking about "its freight of runaway lovers, cabaret girls, Knights of Malta, vamps, acrobats, smugglers, papal nuncios, private detectives, lecturers in the future of the novel, millionaires, arms' manufacturers, irrigation experts and spies."PLF worked on writing the third volume of his pan-European journey off and on between 1990 and his death in 2011, at age ninety-six. He never finished it. It ends mid-sentence, with the youthful PLF still in Bulgaria, about 120 miles short of his goal, which was Constantinople (as he preferred to call the city). As a point of biography, PLF spent several weeks in Istanbul and then embarked on a tour of the Greek Orthodox monasteries on the rugged peninsula of Mount Athos. During that excursion he maintained a detailed diary, the eighty pages of which are appended to THE BROKEN ROAD. It is entitled "Mount Athos", and it can be skipped. The contrast between it and THE BROKEN ROAD and its two predecessors is stark. As keen an observer as the youthful PLF was, the books written forty and more years later are so much richer and more engaging. They transcend travel literature; for me they are literature pure and simple, and they are among the highlights of my reading career.

Part 3 of the trilogy by acclaimed Travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, of a journey on foot from the Netherlands to Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1933-4 is a fantastic close to one of the best travel adventures of the last 100 years.Fermor flunked out of school in England, grew tired of constant and aimless partying and decided to strike out across Europe by foot. Financed by an allowance of an English Pound a week from his family, he took months gathering acquaintances and language facility as he went - mooching off of everyone he could on the way. Fermor's first book of the series,  A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (New York Review Books Classics) , wasn't published until 1977, decades after the real events. Fermor relied on memory mostly, and some various diaries and manuscripts relating to the trip. The result was this masterpiece which I feel is the single best travel book of the 20th century. I'm not alone in that belief, by the way.Fermor's second book, published in 1986, wasn't as good for a variety of reason.  Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (New York Review Books Classics)  This 3rd book was published after Fermor's death in 2011 and wasn't finished. However there were draft versions and variations that had been worked on by Fermor and it was almost finished, so don't think this is mostly non-Fermor. Fermor's biographer, Artemis Cooper  Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure , and noted travel author Colin Thubron, successfully edited this book and it reads like vintage Fermor to the end.We get the benefit of an 18 year old starry-eyed wanderer with a glib tongue and a photographic memory superimposed on a much older and wiser author looking back through the years at people and places all too often destroyed in the coming WWII. And the journey is fantastic. A modern day Odysseus, Fermor immerses himself in the experience and as a solitary traveler finds himself out there mixing with royalty and thugs. Fermor shows a great depth of historical knowledge in the Balkans as well as facility with languages. And his descriptive prose puts you right into the scenes being described. I simply don't know enough superlatives to describe this. I think this 3rd book is actually closer to the first work of genius in this series and better than the second.Lately, we have found that many travel writers embellish or adjust or fabricate (read: lie) about their experiences. Chatwin, Morris, Kaczynsky and others have all admitted or been found to make up some of their "non-fiction". Fermor doesn't appear to suffer from this artificiality, as near as I can tell - not knowing the area nor the languages spoken there.This is an excellent book, entertaining, humorous, erudite, and just plain fun and adventurous. Why not 5 stars? The arrival in Constantinople was never fleshed out by Fermor. Still, I highly recommend it and also recommend you start with the first book and read them in order.

The last in the trilogy of Patrick Leigh Fermor's classic travelogue, describing an 18-year-old's journey from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the 1930's. I was drawn to PLF's works on the recommendation of a friend, being particularly interested in the early part of the journey described in "A Time of Gifts", which coincidentally I had followed as an 18-y.o. hitch-hiker in the 1960's, through the Black Forest, past the source of the Danube and ending up at the same "Jugendherberge" in Munich. That was as far as I got on my journey, and I remember the frisson of excitement as I travelled in a foreign land without knowing a word of German. Putting me to shame, PLF learned German from scratch on his travels: he also picked up a working vocabulary of Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish and Greek as he made his way to Mount Athos via Istanbul. I was also impressed by his respect for and tolerance of other creeds and cultures: there was no sense of Anglo-Irish superiority as one might have expected. German, Greek, Gypsy, Muslim and Jew are all members of the human race to PLF, to be chronicled impartially, without any attempt to judge their way of life. Just a respectful fascination for everything he saw."The Broken Road" is, in my view, the best of the 3 books. It was drafted 20 years after the events described (unlike the other books, which were written much later). It has a rawness to the narrative, seeming to reflect more accurately the feelings of the author, who was by then 19. His astonishment at being allowed, as an infidel, to sleep in the inner sanctum of a mosque. His fear of being lost without trace amid thorny rocks along the Black Sea coast. His embarrassment at being paid unwelcome attention by a Greek monk. Running throughout, the incredible hospitality offered to a young man by people from every walk of life in the land. Do read this book, but not before you have read the other 2 in the trilogy.

Don't get me wrong, much of it is in PLF's inimitable style, and frankly it's a great relief to (almost) finish the journey having been stuck in limbo at the Iron Gates for several years since reading volume 2.But of course having been compiled by his biographer and literary executor from the notes he left behind, it's not exactly what PLF would have written had he finished it himself. I was particularly disappointed by whole sections that PLF couldn't remember, and by the inclusion of quite a lot of material about what happened to Romania and Bulgaria after the impending war and from some of PLF's subsequent visits - which all feels rather like padding and an unnecessary diversion.In my view it doesn't work as a stand-alone piece of literature, so if you haven't read the first two volumes don't start here. If you have, then it completes the journey, and the trilogy.This book documents, in a slightly unsatisfactory manner, the final missing piece from what was, by any measure, an extraordinary life.

Well, it's over, and we can let Patrick Leigh Fermor depart in peace. I had re-read the books, but it was ten years ago, and it was a bit of shock returning to Leigh Fermor after so long. I loved the first two books, and these are different. What was fascinating was the "Green Diary" excerpt at the end, the contemporary diary of his trip to Mount Athos, directly after he reached Constantinople. When you see this, the raw material, and you read what obtained once he had re-written, you can see why it took him so long.It took me a while to get into this, and I wondered what had changed. Are we less tolerant of this sort of prose than we were in the 80s? Has time made us a bit more cynical about the lost era that he defined? Or am I just older and more cynical than when I first read these books? I'm not going to answer these questions, but what's interesting about this book is that it also touches on these questions. There is an interesting discussion about what he remembers from the actual journey, and what he remembers from subsequent visits. There is also an interesting side discussion of his parents, and his feelings on receiving letters from them. He is clearly tempted to talk about what happened later, but he doesn't.It's also clear how much his prose style developed - the "Green Diary" seems jejune by comparison with his rewriting, but then, it was written when he was barely 20, and he had a lot to learn. His prose style is so wonderful, you understand how much work it took him to re-write, to reach the quality that he wanted, and then to dial it back so that there is coffee along with the whipped cream. You can see the work that it took to make it seem effortless. But I shall be coming back and coming back to this.

To me, as to many readers, those final words - 'to be concluded' - of  Between the Woods and the Water  were unexpected and anti-climactic. It left the 19-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor sitting happily on a boat in the Danube with the Romanian town of Orsova a few miles away on the north bank and the (now Serbian) town of Severin a few miles away to the south.During the 27 years after the publication of 'Between the Woods in the Water' Patrick Leigh Fermor - Paddy to everyone who knew him - made a number of attempts to write the story of the final part of his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Working from fragmentary diaries and an uncertain memory he was still trying to complete the manuscript when he died in 2011.Artemis Cooper and Colin Thurbron - his editors and literary executors - faced a daunting and near-Herculean task in attempting to edit and complete the story. But they've succeeded - and in the process produced a manuscript that retains both Paddy's unique and near lyrical style of writing and his detailed knowledge of the religions, languages and customs of the various countries through which he walked.The touches of humour in the book - particularly when, arriving late at night on outskirts of Budapest, Paddy mistakes a brothel for a down-market hotel - are delightful. Then, a few pages later whilst hiking along a stony beach-side path late at night, he manages to fall into the extremely cold sea - and is rescued by a group of near-nomadic Bulgarian fishermen. He spends some time living with them in their cave, drinking slavo and trying desperately to work out the origins of their Greek dancing...The original manuscript ends, quite literally, in mid-sentence with Paddy still some miles outside Constantinople. Unfortunately we're told very little about his stay in the city but (although Paddy would probably have wished otherwise) Artemis Cooper and Colin Thurbron have included the diary entries of his stay, in January and February 1935, at a number of monasteries on the Orthodox Monastic State of Mount Athos. It makes an excellent finale and is an almost natural lead-in to  A Time to Keep Silence , the fascinating story of the time he spent many years later living almost as a novitiate at a number of Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries in France. Well worth reading.Why only four stars? Perhaps because, for obvious reasons, it's not quite the Patrick Leigh Fermor whose other books I've so thoroughly enjoyed.But, before you start reading 'The Broken Road', you'll probably find it helpful to print out a map of Bulgaria which includes the southern part of Romania plus, to the south, just a little of Greece.Read and enjoy. Between the Woods and the WaterA Time to Keep Silence

Some books are so beautiful that one's reading pace is slowed to make the pleasure last the longer. One such book, The Broken Road, stands alone from the rest of Patrick Leigh Fermor's work, and Paddy hesitated to finish it not slowed by pleasure but by the enormity of working with seven decades of memory. Paddy's other work I have read often, at least twice, given to pausing by the sheer density of the material. This book is different. The scholarship, the elegant turn of phrase, the crafted picture be it of scene or character, yes all is here as always, but now includes so much of Paddy that, although it may be unintentional both on the part of Paddy and of his brilliant editors, Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron, the reader is 'taken up' (to use Paddy's own phrase) by the author to walk each step with him.One senses the excitement of the contrasting cities of architectural elegance or aged and strange curiosities, the challenge of untamed plains and glorious mountains, the beauty of a Europe pre-WW2, pre-communist restrictions, then one feels the depression of storms and soggy valleys, challenging mountain passes and a billet in a peasant's hovel. The chance encounter of Paddy, Greek fishermen and Bulgarian shepherds and the ensuing party and dancing in a vast cave is a classic. This is Europe but one few have experienced, and although I could say happily history has left a Rumania and Bulgaria in part still recognisable from PLF's talented description it is in reality a world which was thought vanished and which lives again through these pages.The book is in two distinct parts, the larger part drawn PLF's memories, although he had been reunited with his Green Diary and he had already written "A Youthful Journey", the building blocks for The Broken Road, they were never collated together by the author or by his editors. The raison d'ȇtre for the walk to reach Constantinople (never Istanbul) from the Hook of Holland was achieved but curiously Paddy's thoughts on reaching his goal were scarcely recorded. The epilogue, so to speak, is a word for word inclusion of a diary written as he walked between monasteries on Mount Athos in the depths of winter. This last masterpiece has less descriptive prose, undoubtedly that would have been achieved had Paddy had the strength to complete the work to his satisfaction; as a woman I would have loved more intricate detail on the frescoes and architecture of the monasteries; but given this diary was never intended for publication the chapter is a gem.