A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

I started Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts back in January and finished it this morning, making it the second book I've actually finished for Mark Slutsky's "Barely a Book Club" – despite starting them all. It is the first of a three-part memoir of Leigh Fermor's journey on foot from Holland to Constantinople, begun in 1933. This book covers his setting out from England in December 1933 just up to his arrival in Hungary at Easter in 1934. His travels took him through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, modern-day Slovakia, with a backtrack to visit Prague, and then just to the border of Hungary at Esztergom. Leigh Fermor, who was just 18 when he started his journey, wandered through a Europe just before the onset of World War II, and because he did not write this book until the 1970s, he manages to capture both what he saw then without the advantage of retrospect, and also to bring the experience of the war and the decades that followed it to bear as well. 

I read the first half of A Time of Gifts rather slowly over a couple weeks in January. I decided it was not the right book to take with me on vacation to Mexico, so I set it aside while I read the two books I did take with me, and then I read the second half quite quickly - the bulk of it just in the last couple days. There were a few stretches of the book that I found a tad tedious – at times, Leigh Fermor goes on at considerable length about stretches of history that were mostly unfamiliar to me, where just a name here and there rang a bell from my high school European history class. He gets caught up, too, in some descriptions that I found made the places harder to imagine rather than easier. But when he comes across people, the force of his personality shines through and you wish you could have known him. Leigh Fermor made fast friends every place he stopped along the road, sometimes with minimal shared language. He communes with peasants and aristocrats, and everything between. He's not above sleeping in the town jail (an option that was evidently available to poor travelers) or in barns or in Salvation Army hostels where every inmate is checked for parasites, when on other nights he sleeps in palaces owned by friends of friends he's made along the way. The number of people who gave him a free bed and a meal along the road is astonishing. This must have been a more common practice 100 years ago, but one feels (and sees) that there must have been something, too, about Leigh Fermor himself that warmed people to him and led them to open their homes and share their food.

I think I found the second half the book more engaging than the first in part because it covered ground I was more familiar with. I've never been to Germany apart from a few hours in Trier, which I drove to after noticing how close I was to Germany on a visit to Luxembourg. But I have visited Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest, traveling between the three cities by train, very close to what must have been Leigh Fermor's route on foot. 

Leigh Fermor's time in Vienna was of particular interest to me, coinciding as it did with a moment in Vienna that already interested me. The Vienna of my imagination comes from Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, was home to Freud and Elias Canetti. 1934, the year Leigh Fermor arrived in Vienna, was the same year Stefan Zweig left it. Freud stayed on another 4 years, but he should have left earlier: Marie Bonaparte essentially paid a ransom for him to allow him to escape. During his time in Vienna, Leigh Fermor observes,

The high proportion of foreign names demonstrated the inheritance of the Hapsburg Empire at its widest expansion. Many subjects of alien race, finding their regional capitals too narrow for them, streamed to the glittering Kaiserstadt: Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Poles, Italians, Jews from the whole of Central and Eastern Europe and every variety of Southern Slav. 

Reading this, I think of Joseph Roth coming to Vienna for his education after a childhood in what is now Western Ukraine, or the Ladino-speaking Elias Canetti, born in present-day Bulgaria, who spent part of his childhood in Vienna and returned there to go to university, staying – like Freud – until 1938. The chapter in A Time of Gifts about Vienna is infused with everything he didn't understand when he was there, but which the Leigh Fermor who was writing the book 40 years later knew lay just beneath the surface. 

Leigh Fermor's observation on arriving in Bratislava was surprisingly similar to one I had when I arrived there: "Listening to the unfamiliar hubbub of Slovak and Magyar the other side, I realized I was at last in a country where the indigenous sounds meant nothing at all." It seems obvious in retrospect, but when I planned my trip that included Bratislava and Budapest, I gave no thought at all to the potential language barrier. I studied German in college, not that I needed it at all in Vienna (or that I remembered much for that matter), but when I arrived in Bratislava, I realized I didn't know the most basic things: I couldn't say hello, or thank you. I couldn't read a menu. I had never felt so at sea. (The only place I'd been before where I truly didn't know any of the language was Tokyo - but Tokyo is quite easy to navigate as an English speaker, and even then I did know the words for Good Morning and Thank You.) When I traveled onward to Budapest, Hungrian was equally mysterious, but English was in much wider use. I wish I had read A Time of Gifts before that trip. 

On finishing A Time of Gifts I immediately went out and ordered the second volume of Leigh Fermor's memoir. I look forward to reading about the next leg of his journey. 

Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis

Mockingbird was the second book I brought with me to Mexico. Like Senselessness, I selected it primarily because it was a book I wouldn't mind leaving behind if I did finish it. I do kind of love the cover, but it's a beat up mass market edition that I didn't think I'd feel attached to. As usual, I didn't get any reading at all done while I was on the ground, but I started Mockingbird on the flight home. I was too tired to read much on the plane, but the first few pages did capture my attention, so I kept going with it after I got home. 

I seem to remember my father went on a Walter Tevis kick a few years ago and I got this on his recommendation. I'd never heard of Tevis, though of course I'd heard of the movie adaptations of his books. This was before The Queen's Gambit TV adaptation, which brought him a whole new round of attention. 

Mockingbird is set in a distant future when humanity is in decline, suicide is rampant, children have ceased to be born, and people live isolated from one another in a drugged state that respects the supreme rule of privacy. I suppose it's a bit different from many other books in the post-apocalyptic genre, because it seems to take place amid a long, slow decline, not in the aftermath of a single event. (I claim no expertise on the genre, so maybe this isn't as uncommon as I imagine.) I really had no idea what I was getting into when I started Mockingbird. In retrospect, I'm not surprised my dad was a fan because he enjoys post-apocalyptic fiction as a rule. I'm not so crazy about it usually, but I did love Mockingbird.

Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya (again)

I'm on a plane from New York to Cancun. I decided at the last moment to bring my copy of Horacio Castellanos Moya's Senselessness with me, because (as I'm sure I mentioned when I wrote about it before -- assuming I read it in a year when I was writing a about all the books I read) the edition I have is terribly marked up, with not very astute marginalia. "This guy is weird," for example. I recently came into another copy, so I decided i could bring my marked up copy to Mexico, read it, and leave it behind. It took me about three quarters of my flight to read it cover to cover. 

I didn't remember many details about Senselessness beyond that it was about a guy who gets a job copyediting 1100 pages of firsthand testimonies by indigenous people and activists who survived the brutal massacres of countless people at the hands of the military in an unnamed country. Our narrator is not always sympathetic, but he slips into a state of madness from reading -- absorbing -- these horrors day in and out. "I am not complete in the mind," is the opening passage of the book, a quote from one of these indigenous survivors, but a reflection as well of the narrator's own state. The reader must wonder if his growing paranoia is justified, or if it's only that he is not complete in the mind.

On this reading, I read Senselessness as a sort of sequel to Castellanos Moya's book, The Dream of My Return, which I've also read twice, but it seems to me in the wrong order. I should go back and read it now with this fresh in my mind. In The Dream of My Return, the narrator is on the verge of leaving Mexico City for his home country, where his life may be in danger, but where he feels a compulsion to return, risking his own life. This potentially dangerous copyediting job could be the thing that awaits him there.