I was not able to get through this book, so four stars constitutes a "pass" from me.

Written more than 50 years after the walking tour described, this book is really a literary opus and not a travel account laced with some historical vignettes in the vein of, say, Bill Bryson.

I sound as if I'm panning the book, but I'm really saying it's not what I expected. Please read other reviews to see if the prose style is something that would interest you.

This book and its sequel, "Between the Woods and the Water," is truly a classic of the personal odyssey genre. Together they are the report by the English author of a diary he wrote between the ages of 19 and 22 while he walked from Holland to Istanbul. But he writes his report after a lengthy career in military service and, among other things, in journalism. The result combines the enthusiasm of a young student with the measured and spare prose of a seasoned and skilled veteran. The author as student is amazingly well schooled, even though thrown out of his public school. His reflections on what he sees are both erudite and almost poetic. (Read, e.g., the chapter, Prague Under Snow.) They don't serve as a normal travel guide, but they'll introduce you to the lands he traverses in a way that will make your own visit unusually well informed.

This book and its sequel, "Between the Woods and the Water," is truly a classic of the personal odyssey genre. Together they are the report by the English author of a diary he wrote between the ages of 19 and 22 while he walked from Holland to Istanbul. But he writes his report after a lengthy career in military service and, among other things, in journalism. The result combines the enthusiasm of a young student with the measured and spare prose of a seasoned and skilled veteran. The author as student is amazingly well schooled, even though thrown out of his public school. His reflections on what he sees are both erudite and almost poetic. (Read, e.g., the chapter, Prague Under Snow.) They don't serve as a normal travel guide, but they'll introduce you to the lands he traverses in a way that will make your own visit unusually well informed.

`Between the Woods and the Water' is a delightful travelogue, even though the sites and sounds are long gone. Fermor paints a picture of the life every young man wants to lead - well-funded itinerant travel, nearly effortless sociability, and a seemingly endless nightlife. This is the ultimate "Wish You Were Here" card, well worth the read for anyone interested in travel, history, and tales of pre-war social frivolity in Eastern Europe.

The narrative structure took me by surprise. Almost every region receives a minor academic treatment prior to Fermor's personal tales: history, language, architecture, nature, fun and games, repeat. I found myself skimming past descriptions of birds and trees, but fascinated by the author's insights into the interplay of geography, language development, and regional history. And, of course, it is impossible not to be won over by the author's late nights, fleeting loves, and brief stays with forgotten royalty.

My father often told me that `On the Road' had a profound effect on him as a youth. `Between the Woods and the Water' has a similar effect on me, only later in life. After the reading the story I was offered a brief trip to Hungary which I could not pass up. Far from Fermor's experience, I was greeted with mindless business meetings, post-communism industrial architecture, a robbery, and small-scale street riots. In the end, my disappointment with reality deepened my appreciation of the book - a memorializing tale of a geography and way of life that no longer exists.

This is the continuation of, "A Time of Gifts." The English youth continues his walk across Europe to Constantinople. He picks up now in Austria, on to Hungary following the Danube valley. I wanted to quit reading this - page after page of allusions to east European history from Roman and pre-Roman times, Hungarian geography, reflections on Slavic languages. Esoterics I cannot appreciate. Still, they lured me and challenged me. These are places and these are people - Magyars and Gypsies - we seldom find in writing. We are introduced just as an era is about to end and everything is to change. It can be a book to go to bed with.

I got this book before Amazon existed and I've bought multiple copies since then.
Buy this and treasure it, give it to your friends.

This is the sequel to Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts. In 1933, the very young Leigh Fermor set out to travel by foot from Holland to Constantinople. Written many years after this adventure, Between the Woods and the Water describes Leigh Fermor's travels in Hungary and Transylvania. He had the good fortune to make some aristocratic connections and spent a good part of the trip being passed from country house to country house and town to town within an extended family network of the Hungarian aristocracy. The Hungary and Transylvania Leigh Fermor describes had already changed greatly under the impact of the First World War, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Great Depression. Many, if not all of the aristocratic figures from whom Leigh Fermor received hospitality, were living lives of genteel poverty on much reduced estates. Still, he describes a world that would be swept away by the events of WWII, the installation of communist states and the postwar industrialization of much of Eastern Europe. The Hungary and Transylvania through which Leigh Fermor travels is very rural, dominated by a peasantry still coexisiting with the aristocracy. Transylvania in particular was ethnically diverse with significant populations of ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, Jews, and Gypsies. These populations were divided also by a variety of languages and faiths. The awareness on the part of the author and readers of fate of these peoples gives much of this book an elegiac quality. Wonderfully written with superb historical digressions and some outstanding descriptive writing about the landscapes, this is book is just a treat. The natural comparison is with the predecessor volume. I think this is the better of the two. This volume was published in the mid-80s with Leigh Fermor promising a sequel that would cover the final segment of the journey. Sadly, this has never been published and given Leigh Fermor's advanced age, it is unlikely to be completed. A real pity.

Here, in part two of Patrick Fermor's promised three-part account of his 1933-1934 walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, the 19 year old wanderer/journalist strolls unguided through Hungary and into darkest Transylvania. Along the way he reads in the great private libraries and parties with washed-up aristocrats; wonders about water buffalo, the echoes of Hapsburg heirarchies, Rumanian gothic architecture, and barbaric wedding practices; rests with gypsies and gabs with rich landowners... He by then had fallen into the rhythm of his travels, and his powers of observation illuminate a strange and distant central Europe. But this isn't mere travel writing. He isn't simply shining a light on a place, a time, and a people. His writing is so ecstatic and muscular that the reader is transported to real yearning for experience, and to face that experience with eyes unclouded by cynicism or too much ossifying adulthood. This book, even more than A Time of Gifts, is a portrait of an enviable mind, a mind that is simultaneously open to experience and wise, or at least subtle and clear-thinking, but refined by a liberal education. The real gift of these books is for us to see a clear glimpse into the mind of a person who is living fully. The glimpse shows the folly of planning, of responsibility, of routine and care. Few writers have ever equalled the clarity of this offering. The life of the cubicle and the steady paycheck is the life of frailty and trepidation. This book spreads a warm ray of strength, resilience, and joy in discovery. A true delight.

Fermor's journey begun in A TIME OF GIFTS continues in this companion volume. Like its predecessor, it is an exhausting, at times frustrating, demanding read, and equally worthwhile. The reader is cautioned that he or she must be prepared every few paragraphs to look up words the reader has never heard of before, or to look up words used in ways the reader has never used in the same way before; to trace Fermor's topographical references on outside maps, since none are provided by the book; and to have access to outside sources to comprehend Fermor's references to frequently unexplained, or cursorily explained, peoples, places and events. (If I may lodge any criticism about both A TIME OF GIFTS and BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER, it is that Fermor assumes the reader to be intimately familiar with the arcane. Because that assumption may be inaccurate, the uninitiated reader might profit from the creation of an additional volume, a guide, that is, to both books that consists of maps, a glossary, annotations, and a bibliography. Readers who make the effort to keep up with Fermor should not constantly be made to feel he is about to leave them behind in a cloud of dust as he speeds down some remote Rumanian highway lost in his remarkable thoughts.) BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER differs only slightly from A TIME OF GIFTS in that fewer architectural treasures are encountered and commented upon. But, like the latter, it is the beauty and quiet of the earth, the common people, an endearing cast of lovable, clueless aristocrats, and the colorful histories that surround them all, that are the stars of the show. And it is Fermor's fascinating inner life and winsome personality that make these books the joy and the education they are.