So, I'm optimistic that the remainder of the trip covered by the sequel will be more adventurous, shall we say. Czechoslovakia seemed a transition zone (remember, Kafka wrote in German not Czech). Moreover, he just seems too comfortable as long as there are English/German speakers at hand, moving from one host to another by word-of-mouth in Germany and Austria. Regarding the text itself, there seemed to be a fair amount of digression at the beginning, detracting from the travel narrative aspect. Part of the problem has to do with the audio narrator's somewhat dramatically effete-sounding style, although he seems to pronounce German phrases (which pop up regularly) like a native. I wish it weren't so, but I have to say I was mildly disappointed by the book. Narrator didn't seem the greatest fit perhaps? So, 'A Time of Gifts' is a illustration of two things we've lost from this world. He spends months of his life in their townhouses, on their manors, in their libraries, and at their dining tables and in his recollections - this book was written from his memory and from the aid of his travel journals well into his middle age - show us a world at the end of time, ready to be wiped out by the second world war and by communist expansion. He also has access to the dying aristocratic class of Eastern Europe.

He has his whole life and the entire continent of Europe ahead of him. The young Leigh Fermor in this book is just out of school, but he hasn't lost his English public schoolboy's yen for the prank and the reckless adventure. That's what makes this book both beautiful and exciting. This is a guy who has inherited the the wealth of Western learning, but has nothing to lose. It turns out he's one of the last of his kind - classically educated, straight out of the English middle class, ready to be trained for the peace-time cavalry, and so poor he has to borrow his evening clothes.

Now acquainted with more than one writer chasing this one, I decided to investigate this Leigh Fermor. Same with the second book I consulted - the one that was supposed to be the armchair travel book on the Danube, but turned out to be flat and purposeless. The first book I read was a natural history of the river, long on descriptions of hydroelectric dams, but in between the descriptions of the river's current and the Roman ruins there were references to Patrick Leigh Fermor's trip through Eastern Europe. I'm doing a cruise on the Danube later this summer so I decided to do some research.

A time of gifts