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Cargando... Words of Mercurypor Patrick Leigh Fermor
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. This book consists of extracts from Patrick Leigh Fermor's books along with book reviews, memoirs of old friends and other pieces of writing. I own copies of "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water", but the passages taken from those books were worth re-reading and the rest of the the book was equally good. I wish he would finish writing up the final part of his epic 1930s journey from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, but I'll keep an eye out for his other books anyway. In one of the book reviews the author says "A book like this should instruct, touch off new trains of thought, promote fruitful discord and, above all, send the reader back to the original" and I've definitely found that to be the case with his own books.
It is an archetypal Leigh Fermor anecdote: beautifully written, fabulously romantic and just a little showy. For Leigh Fermor's greatest virtues as a writer are also his greatest vices: his incantational love of great waterfalls of words, combined with the wild, scholarly enthusiasms of a brilliant autodidact. On the rare occasions he gets it wrong, Paddy has been responsible for some of the most highly coloured purple passages in travel literature. But at his best he is sublime, unbeatable.
Patrick Leigh Fermor was only 18 when he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, described many years later in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. It was during these early wanderings that he started to pick up languages, and where he developed his extraordinary sense of the continuity of history: a quality that deepens the colours of every place he writes about, from the peaks of the Pyrenees to the cell of a Trappist monastery. His experiences in wartime Crete sealed the deep affection he had already developed for Greece, a country whose character and customs he celebrates in two books, Mani and Roumeli, and where he has lived for over forty years. Whether he is drawing portraits in Vienna or sketching Byron's slippers in Missolonghi, the Leigh Fermor touch is unmistakable. Its infectious enthusiasm is driven by an insatiable curiosity and an omnivorous mind - all inspired by a passion for words and language that makes him one of the greatest prose writers of his generation. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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This book is a lovely collection of articles grouped into various sections, travels, Greece, people books and the wonderfully titled flotsam. Some are drawn from his earlier books and others are articles that have appeared in various magazines and newspapers. The subjects are diverse, varying from bicycle polo to Gluttony, Bryon to Andalucía and are written in his indomitable style. Whilst I have read a number of the pieces before, there are several that I haven’t. Most of the articles are really good, not all of them are. It would be a good introduction to one of my favourite writers for those that are interested. ( )