An account of a journey by foot undertaken by Fermor in 1935/1936. The whole journey extends from Holland to Istanbul, but this book covers the section through Hungary and Romania. It is well written, and fun to imagine travelling like this, but the most interesting part is the portrait he draws of a world that was on the edge of disappearing in 1936. Eastern Europe was at least 50 years behind it seems at that time. It was still a land of landed aristocratic families and village tenant farmers, something which had disappeared from France, England and Germany by then. It is as if this corner of the world had remained untouched by the cataclysm of the First World War, and the social and traditional norms that had been swept away elsewhere hung on for a few last decades in the world Fermor is travelling through. Of course, you have to realize also that he is of that world, and a young romantic, so his portrait is highly coloured.
But it is still an interesting oddity to read this book that would have been produced at the same time that the Surrealist, Dadaists and other modern art movements were raging elsewhere.
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