Product Description

For the first time in John Murray B-format paperback, this is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a barely-written part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe. Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains a perhaps stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa...Leigh Fermor's hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic - together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60468 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
'An extraordinary book of adventure and encounter, fantasy and learning, observation and experience' -- Sunday Times 'From the Mani he has brought back riches. How can one do justice to the fascination and poetry of this book, its generosity and its learning - its love?' -- Spectator 'He supercharges his narrative with a combination of tenderness and high spirits appropriate to his past achievements as a guerrilla leader in Crete' -- Daily Telegraph 'Mani and Roumeli: two of the best travel books of the century' -- Financial Times 'John Murray is doing the decent thing and reissuing all of Leigh Fermor's main books ... But what else would you expect from a publisher whose commitment to geography is such that for more than two centuries it has widened our understanding of the world?' -- Geographical Magazine 20040801 'Bringing the landscape alive as no other writer can, he uses his profound and eclectic understanding of cultures and peoples ... to paint vivid pictures - nobody has illuminated the geography of Europe better' -- Geographical Magazine 20040801 'Extraordinarily engaging ... thanks to Leigh Fermor's ability to turn an insight into a telling phrase ...a compelling story' -- London Review of Books 20050818

Financial Times
'Mani and Roumeli: two of the best travel books of the century'

Manchester Evening News
"Not to be missed."

Customer Reviews

Smart and witty travel in Southern Greece
I took this book with me on a trip to Sparti in Southern Greece this year (2001). Although this book recollects a journey taken (in the 1950s) before the tourist blitz, it still holds true in many of the subjects discussed...especially the undying village myths that combine pagan and Christian elements. Paddy does a great job melding history with his travels, and relates the present-day to what happened during the Byzantine era and Turkish occupation. His imagery is very complex, but his portraits of the Greeks in the Mani are very insightful and entertaining.

A world of wonders
MANI ... It is not for nothing that Patrick Leigh Fermor is generally considered the greatest living travel writer in English. Reading any one of his books, always a smooth, elegant and intellectually exciting undertaking, is to accept an invitation to the private world of a master observer of places and manners who is also pretty sharp in such areas of human endeavor as history, architecture, music, theology, psychology, mythology, and languages both classical and modern. He is extremely erudite - an autodidact, he says - and his approach to travel writing is strictly literary and sometimes sublimely so. This book, doubtless conceived as a companion volume to ROUMELI, which deals with Northern Greece, takes us to the southernmost part of the Peloponnesus. Unfortunately, the world of rocks and rustics and supreme beauty it describes is now largely vanished, so it is therefore of great value to have a traveler's vision and memory of it as it was about sixty years ago. Always subtle and elegant, the story takes on a heightened aesthetic and intellectual intensity at certain points and in particular locales. For example, the opening paragraph of the book's final chapter describes the writer's arrival at Gytheio by means of an extended metaphor comparing entrance into a city with the act of coitus, and if any reader should miss this metaphor let me point out the author's use of such words as maidenhead and deflower. A further adornment of the metaphor, conceptual and literary, is provided by the revelation that the little island a few yards off the coast, now named Marathonisi and now connected to Gytheio by a causeway, but called Kranae by Homer, is in fact the island where Paris and Helen spent their fist night after the famous elopement. At another point the reader is invited to watch the dolphins scull down at exactly the imaginary line in the Adriatic where the filioque drops out of the creed. We are allowed to eavesdrop on a group of centaurs on the Pelion Peninsula, and a passing reference to Henry Miller and George Katsimbalis develops into a chain reaction of crowing roosters around the world and back again. There s an excellent chapter on the peculiar little village of Areopolis, the gateway to the Inner Mani, where the author attempts an interpretation of the ancient carvings on churches and houses. This marvelous book will be of interest to anyone who feels attracted to the beauties of Greece and its people, but also to those who enjoy supremely well-written prose.

Beware, you'll want to go there.
I discovered PLF's "Mani" in the early 1990's and was absolutely enchanted not just by the places he described but by the beauty of his writing. His descriptive skills are second to none and his knowledge and use of the English language is a delight.

Through his writing he demonstrates a deep-felt love for Greece and its people. His profound knowledge of the history of the country coupled with a lively imagination at times takes the reader off into some strange flights of fantasy. When he returns to the very real world of the Inner Mani it is often to show that the region is as fantastic as anything from his imagination.

You may find that you'll need a dictionary to hand and one or two passages on the convoluted history and genealogy of long dead rulers and despots may leave you thinking you've stumbled across a medieval census but don't be put off, you will also be rewarded with writing that leaves you with images that will last you a lifetime.

But beware, I was so captured by PLF's description of the Mani that I had to follow in his footsteps and go and see for myself. Not the first and I'm sure not the last.