Conspicuous Consumption

 I enjoyed this book, but suspect I would have liked it even more when I was young person taking slow trains (Shout out to the Eurail pass!) around Europe. This is partly because it is a (lightly?) fictionalized account of just what it is like to be a young person wandering around Europe for no particular reason. While I did my wandering on my own or in the company of other temporarily rootless young people, de Terán's more sensational wanderings are in the company of a Venezuelan bank robber and two guerillas in exile who are his partners. She has married the bank robber on what can only be called a whim at the age of sixteen—he was about twenty years older—and follows in his wake for most of this novel. It's a pleasant ramble, mostly in Italy, but one does rather tire of the protagonist's almost complete lack of agency and her difficult to understand devotion to her not terribly pleasant husband. Apparently this is an early entry in the currently popular sub-genre that we...

  All travel books are nostalgic: They record memories of a trip that is past, and more than a few lament the way the place they are writing about has changed since an earlier generation of travelers visited, was continuing to change while they were there, and has changed even further since they started writing. The past is another country—one that is always elusive. Roumeli , Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his wanders in Northern Greece, was published in 1966, so the Greece he writes about from the years before 1966 is long gone for those of us reading Roumeli more than half a century after it appeared. And yet, the book lives. What brings it alive is Leigh obvious affection for the Greeks he writes about and for the landscape through which he moves. Add to that the pleasure of Leigh Fermor's prose. It's hard to think of a writer with a finer style. His beautifully written account will make you want to visit this remembered Northern Greece, to walk the trails he walked...