This posthumous volume may be the most emotionally satisfying of the three works comprising the trilogy, which describe the eighteen-year-old author'sThis posthumous volume may be the most emotionally satisfying of the three works comprising the trilogy, which describe the eighteen-year-old author's year-long journey by foot along the Danube in 1934-35. (The first volume was A Time of Gifts and the second, Between the Woods and the Water. See my reviews on both of these.) It's astounding we even have it. The editors have taken several of PLF's unfinished manuscripts and pieced them into a convincing semblance of a third volume.
This volume is a more ruminative book than its predecessors. He muses on the strange nature of memory. For only one of the many notebooks PLF scribbled in during his sojourn would be available to him decades later when he started to write. Perhaps because of this deficit, Fermor enters into imaginative flights that were less prominent in the first two volumes, where historical background seemed to anchor the story. Here first impressions reign more. In addition, there are discursions into the approach the writing should take that now lays before our eyes. Should PLF include information from later trips to these same areas, or not? He decides to do so and to disclose it to the reader. No doubt much of this rumination, and a few inapt metaphors, he would have cut had he seen the volume to publication himself. Editors Thubron and Cooper have had to be much more inclusive.
For example, there are admissions of joy in the lush appurtenances of the great homes he visits outside of Bucharest— their libraries, chauffeur driven cars, frequent lush feasts, etc.—the like of which never appeared in volumes 1 and 2. There the rich châteaux were described, yes, but never was there the level of swooning one gets here. Granted, he is coming off a long period of sleeping outdoors under his great coat, or in flea-ridden, undistinguished hovels, and lately the weather has turned cold so these creature comforts are no doubt more keenly appreciated. Then guilt descends:
Pricked by conscience about this sybaritic way of life a few days later, after being driven (yet again) to luncheon at a country club on the edge of Lake Snagov, some miles outside of Bucharest, I set out to return on foot.
Leigh Fermor was a beauty and a philanderer of extraordinary scope. This third volume seems much more relaxed with regard to the author's female companions than its predecessors. The depiction of Nadejda in the Bulgarian town of Plovdiv is, I think, without parallel in the previous books. This no doubt has much to do with the fact that those earlier books were published during the author's lifetime, when his lady friends and their husbands were still alive. Now with everyone conveniently dead, the editors—one is PLF's biographer—can be forthcoming with textual hints of his libidinous exploits, which, it should be noted, are nothing more than normal hotblooded sexuality.
The triliogy is, among other things, something of a tribute to the peacefulness of Europe even in the face of the Nazi threat of 1934. PLF comes across some strong opinions during his trek from Holland to Istanbul, largely on foot. These often appear in the text. His facility for learning languages on the fly here is astounding. Nothing, however, quite prepares the reader for the night in Tirnovo, Bulgaria, when word is brought to the café where PLF and his host are relaxing, that a Bulgarian assassin has just murdered King Alexander of Yugoslavia and his host, the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou. Everyone in the café, except PLF, erupts into joyous cheers and dancing. At no point in the trilogy up until now has anything so damning been revealed of any of the dozens of peoples the author chronicles. But the Bulgarians make their mark here for blatant xenophobia and nationalist myopia unparalleled even by the Nazis PLF meets in volume one. It's an obscene moment which reveals longstanding Bulgarian suffering for years of poor decisions in the realm of foreign relations. Her hatred of those states surrounding her is beyond the irrational. Greece and Romania and Yugoslavia were all apportioned slivers of Bulgarian land because of the latter's support of Germany in the first world war. She would make the same mistake in the second world war. As PLF puts it:
Bulgarians have a perverse genius for fighting on the wrong side. If they have been guided more by their hearts and less by their political heads, which usually seem to have lacked principal and astuteness in equal measure, their history might have been happier one. (p. 95)
It's interesting to compare francophile Bucharest, Romania, that PLF visits in October 1934—with its vigorous intellectual, artistic, literary and social life—with the dead city of the same name found in Saul Bellow's novel The Dean's December, crushed under the heel of Marxist-Leninist claptrap. Writing of the many wonderful people he'd met there, it was necessary for PLF to mention only those who had left the country or died. For to mention those still living in the country would have been to make them targets of the police state. See Herta Müller's astonishing The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment for an idea of what an unalloyed joy that can be.
PLF gives us the lowdown on the Pharnriots, a Hellenic people who brought the last vestiges of Byzantine culture to Romania after the capture of Constantinople in the late 1400s. This whole area, by the way, Bulgaria mostly, but also Romania and Hungary, faced repeated violent upheaval due to their geographical position as land bridge from Asia to the west. The Huns, Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, etc. all came marauding through this area over a period of many centuries. In 1529, the Turks reached Vienna itself which they would continue to attack from time to time over the next 150 years, but never take.
The passes in the mountain barrier outside were perhaps the funnels through which, in 1241, the hordes of Genghis Kahn had swarmed to tear Europe to bits. (p. 193
What is lost in terms of polish and finish here is more than made up for by the sheer ebullience of the writing. I don't know of any writer who drinks in a landscape the way PLF does. I find the book's descriptive verve, especially toward the end when he is walking along the Black Sea—and later, too, in the Mt. Athos diary which closes the book—so vivid, so moving. When, after almost drowning in a tide pool, our traveler comes back out onto the beach, he discovers a cave sheltering shepherds (Bulgarian) and fishermen (Greek) next to a roaring fire. He is soaking wet and we shudder to think what might have happened had he not, to use his phrase, "struck lucky." In the warm and welcoming cave, there's plenty of slivo to go around and soon this engenders dances by two of the men, to vigorous bagpiping of all things. A table is clenched in one dancer's teeth as he whirls to a blur.
It's vivid stuff, though not always complete. The main deficiency being the much anticipated description of Istanbul, for which the Mount Athos diary is meant to serve as a kind of compensation. It doesn't quite fill the bill though, despite the interesting descriptions of the Greek Orthodox monasteries and their monks, since it's fragmented and tonally different from the rest of the book. Hence, the editors' fitting title....more
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