Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates

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parallax structure, the narrative is split between the past time of his journey and the future time of his writing. As a rhetorical device it allows Leigh Fermor to jump seamlessly between the past and the present, enabling him to write in a way that both captures the younger Leigh

Both families produced legions of soldiers and diplomats in the service of Hungary. Therefore it delighted Pista Pálffy when he was press-ganged into the new communist-led army and given the lowest possible rank in the hope of humiliating him. This move did not have the desired effect. “You see,” he joked with friends, “I am the first Pálffy in history to be in the army and not be a general.” The recording is from a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled “The Art of Travel” (broadcast c.1990-1992) in which Annette Kobrak interviewed Paddy for about 26 minutes concerning his early life and his journey to Constantinople. There are some good discussions about his travels after Between the Woods and the Water, about Bulgaria and into Constantinople. Both places act as bookends to Ottoman history: the Tomb symbolizes its beginning, Ada Kaleh its end. Fermor’s boyish charm and the older Leigh Fermor’s wisdom and knowledge. It lends narrative power to the images of lost Europe that he constructs, for Leigh Fermor has experienced this past and can contrast it with the narrative present. Lewis remained silent, but the next day sent Pálffy a note saying he had found a reference in a medieval play showing the English obsession with the weather predating the Armada’s sinking by several centuries.

The crocus is named “banaticus” from early finds in the Banat, territory that became a bitter triangular contest between Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania, until the Treaty of Versailles divided it between the latter two in 1919. The most recent reports of the flower are further east, so we began our hunt in the Transylvanian villages founded by German-speaking Saxons. In the 12th century, the offer of land and a tax-free life lured thousands of Saxons to migrate from the area of modern Luxembourg and settle in Transylvania. They strengthened the land’s defences and vitalised its crafts and crops, terracing the hillsides and growing apples and productive vines. Between 1980 and 1990, many migrated in reverse. They were sold by Ceausescu, no friend of village life, to the Kohl government in Germany who saw them as loyal voters. Before Ceausescu’s fall, up to 250,000 Saxons returned to take up German citizenship, leaving only a rump to maintain churches, crafts and houses. Recovers the innocence and the excitement of youth, when everything was possible and the world seemed luminescent with promise. ...Even more magical...through Hungary, its lost province of Transylvania, and into Romania... sampling the tail end of a languid, urbane and anglophile way of life that would soon be swept away forever.”—Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review Paddy crossed into Esztergom and watched an amazing Easter service led by the bishop with crowds nobles, soldiers and their ladies dressed in their finest clothes and colourful uniforms. A sight that will never be seen again. Though born into the purple of Hungarian aristocratic life on both sides of his family, Pálffy only enjoyed the benefits which that station offered for a few years of his boyhood. By the time he was 15, he had been declared by the new Communist regime to be a class enemy and an enemy of the people. He was expelled from his private school and compelled to work as an unskilled labourer. He was later sent as a prisoner to a forced labour camp before escaping to England in 1956.

I have been saving these images for some months now so that I could present them to you at Christmas; it is always good to have something new for Christmas! To help you further, here is a short synopsis by John Colvin Body which appears to have been published in the Daily Telegraph in 1994. Even more magical...through Hungary, its lost province of Transylvania, and into Romania...sampling the tail end of a languid, urbane and anglophile way of life that would soon be swept away forever.”—Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review

The reason why I'm giving this rating is that even though I felt the story had a lot of potential, I kept losing focus because the pacing was very slow and the author used too many descriptions. I love prose with descriptions and the author sometimes wrote such lovely quotes when she described certain sceneries...However, in almost every paragraph, EVERY detail of what was happening from action to thoughts to physical reactions to feelings etc was included (I even found a paragraph in which a quote was unnecessarily repeated twice ("Her jaw dropped."), in my opinion, everything was excessively described. I believe that the plot would have benefited from fewer descriptions, especially because it is a story that can be read not just as a YA but also may appeal to MG fans but I felt like the writing style was closer to an adult novel even though the story is undeniably juvenile. Unfortunately, It prevented me from fully enjoying this novel. Pips is pictured in a pen-and-ink drawing playing Wagner at the piano. He had been educated by tutors and had ‘a wide circle of friends in the arts and the theatre, is a man around town in several capitals and is impeccably dressed…’. A further sign of his high profile: ‘Pips appears as the protagonist of a highly successful novel of the time by the German Jewish novelist Jakob Wassermann…Our aesthetic hero is a pal of archdukes…He is erudite about incunabula and Renaissance art…’. Kovecses became a retreat for the Ephrussi family, a refuge from the banking hothouse of Vienna for games, music and plays, for swimming, walking riding and shooting in the years before 1914.