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Tuesday 22 July 2014

A Time to Keep Silence - Patrick Leigh Fermor

A book about stays in several monasteries.  Reveals his fascination with things medieval.  There is one section about a visit to the rock monasteries of Cappadocia.

I found this book a bit thick and self-indulgent; not so much about the purported subject as about Fermor's image of the subject.  Loaded with charged adjectives, you really learn more about him and his view of life than you do about the monasteries.  For someone who had so much trouble with authority and structure in his schooling, he is remarkably respectful of, even infatuated with, authority in other realms.  This is equally true when you look at who he praises in this travel books too, though less evident.  As if he can have a romanticized view of authority and a life of rules, but only so long as it doesn't apply to him.

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