The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos Author: Patrick Leigh Fermor | Language: English | ISBN:
B00F1W07FU | Format: PDF
The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos Description
In the winter of 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick (“Paddy”) Leigh Fermor set out on a walk across Europe, starting in Holland and ending in Constantinople, a trip that took him almost a year. Decades later, Leigh Fermor told the story of that life-changing journey in
A Time of Gifts and
Between the Woods and the Water, two books now celebrated as among the most vivid, absorbing, and beautifully written travel books of all time.
The Broken Road is the long-awaited account of the final leg of his youthful adventure that Leigh Fermor promised but was unable to finish before his death in 2011. Assembled from Leigh Fermor’s manuscripts by his prizewinning biographer Artemis Cooper and the travel writer Colin Thubron, this is perhaps the most personal of all Leigh Fermor’s books, catching up with young Paddy in the fall of 1934 and following him through Bulgaria and Romania to the coast of the Black Sea. Days and nights on the road, spectacular landscapes and uncanny cities, friendships lost and found, leading the high life in Bucharest or camping out with fishermen and shepherds–in the
The Broken Road such incidents and escapades are described with all the linguistic bravura, odd and astonishing learning, and overflowing exuberance that Leigh Fermor is famous for, but also with a melancholy awareness of the passage of time, especially when he meditates on the scarred history of the Balkans or on his troubled relations with his father. The book ends, perfectly, with Paddy’s arrival in Greece, the country he would fall in love with and fight for. Throughout it we can still hear the ringing voice of an irrepressible young man embarking on a life of adventure.
- File Size: 2830 KB
- Print Length: 385 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1590177541
- Publisher: New York Review Books (March 4, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00F1W07FU
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,603 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Specific Groups > Adventurers & Explorers - #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Travel > Europe - #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Travel
- #9
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Specific Groups > Adventurers & Explorers - #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Travel > Europe - #10
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Travel
A broken repast, some scattered crumbs, some morsels missing and forgotten, some condiments lacking ... but still a feast! After a thirty year wait, Paddy's readers finally get to read the third volume of his planned series; recounting his youthful walk from England to Constantinople. Re-constructed from works he never finished editing, morsels of recovered diaries and letters, the volume, loving compiled by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper (what sterling editors) concludes, in an honorable way, the intention of the author.
Here again we hear that distinctive voice recount the joys and confusions of his youthful search for knowledge, experience that same dramatic contrasts between sleeping many weeks in the bone-chilling cold of smoky peasant cots with golden respites in the castles and chauffeur driven stays with the old, and already dying-out aristocratic of the olden Mittel-Europe.
The final chapter has echoes of the "Time for Silence" and "Mani" books that gloriously emerged from his later wanders in Greece and is extracted from one of the few diaries (The Green Diary) that survived his war-time exploits and the European ravages of the decades after his trip.
If it is perhaps true that this "broken" and unpolished volume is not the best introduction to the trilogy, it certainly is a vibrant and tempting overture to his subsequent writing in Greece. A wonderful, rich read.
By John the Reader
There are three passages of the first quality, the rest almost always high second, very few clangers. He wrote better books than this, but few write books as good as this.
By J. J. O'DONNELL
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