Print List Price: | $22.95 |
Kindle Price: | $11.99 Save $10.96 (48%) |
Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services Price set by seller. |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the authors
OK
The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Carribean Islands (New York Review Books Classics) Kindle Edition
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNYRB Classics
- Publication dateNovember 9, 2011
- File size19992 KB
Customers who bought this item also bought
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Being a natural romantic, Leigh Fermor was able to probe the hidden recesses of this mixed civilization and to present us with a picture of the Indies more penetrating and original than any that has been presented before." —Harold Nicholson, The Observer
"Before mass-market guides like Frommer’s and Lonely Planet, travelogues were tourists’ main resources outside Europe. For the 1950s Caribbean, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree was the bible." —The New York Times
"Still the best piece of travel writing on the Caribbean." —The Guardian
Praise for Patrick Leigh Fermor:
"One of the greatest travel writers of all time”–The Sunday Times
“A unique mixture of hero, historian, traveler and writer; the last and the greatest of a generation whose like we won't see again.”–Geographical
“The finest traveling companion we could ever have . . . His head is stocked with enough cultural lore and poetic fancy to make every league an adventure.” –Evening Standard
If all Europe were laid waste tomorrow, one might do worse than attempt to recreate it, or at least to preserve some sense of historical splendor and variety, by immersing oneself in the travel books of Patrick Leigh Fermor.”—Ben Downing, The Paris Review
About the Author
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a doctoral student in geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written for The Guardian, The Believer, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Although Fermor had travelled extensively, he found the West Indies to be unlike anything he could have imagined, and each new experience is a surprise. This book is a pleasure to read, full of excitement and rich sensory experience, as well as beautifully written. Fermor's first view of the islands demonstrates the elegance of his language:
"To port, pale green islands were floating on the water, but the main body of Grande Terre...lay in shadow on the starboard side between us and the dawn. It was just possible to descry the waves of black vegetation and the lakes of mist entangled in the treetops where the country dipped. In the space of a few minutes the sunrise melted from violet into amber, from amber into scarlet, from scarlet into zinc and from zinc into saffron. The dark vegetation became a line of giant, pale green parsley, which hovered a hundred yards away in a fluttering cumulus that nothing appeared to tether to either land or sea."
Language, religion, costume, geography - the author inquires into everything, and because of this natural curiosity, he gets himself into some interesting, and often funny, situations, like being chased around the beach by a blindfolded man with a divining rod. Equally interesting, though, are his descriptions of the specific melding of cultures that has occurred exclusively in these islands:
"The afternoon was baking and shadowless, and the town seemed only with an effort to remain upright among its thoroughfares of dust. It was as empty as a sarcophagus. The French guide-book describes it as a great centre of elegant Creole life in the past, hinting at routs and cavalcades and banquets of unparalleled sumptuousness. Acts of God must have fallen upon it with really purposeful vindictiveness, for not by the most violent manhandling of the imagination could one associate a chandelier or a powdered wig with this collection of hovels. Not even a dog was to be seen. But behind a tall crucifix stood a cemetery of such dimensions - Pere Lachaise and the Campo Santo gone mad...These acres inhabited by the dead, these miniature hails and palaces and opera-houses, were, it occurred to me, the real town, and the houses falling to ruins outside the railings were in the nature of a negligible suburb."
He is generally respectful of the cultures he encounters, and describes the dining habits of cannibals without batting an eyelash:
"The victims were prepared while still alive, by cutting slits down the back and sides into which pimentos and other herbs were stuffed. After being dispatched with a mace, they were trussed to poles and roasted over a medium fire, while the women busied themselves turning and basting, and catching the lard in gourds and calabashes, which they allowed to set and then stored away. They would eagerly lick the sticks where the gravy had fallen. Often the meal was half roasted, and then half boiled. Some of the meat was eaten on the spot, the rest was cut up and smoked and also prudently put by for lean or unpatriotic periods in the future. But there was a symbolical aspect to these banquets. They were considered to seal a military victory, to put it for ever beyond question. De Rochefort reports that a Carib prisoner, while being made ready, would jeer at his captors, saying that, although they would soon be eating him, he had already swallowed so many of their family or tribe, and was so thoroughly nourished on their neighbours and kin, that they would virtually be eating one of their own people. This kind of language would continue until the final blow was delivered. It never failed to exasperate the company, and to cast an atmosphere of dejection over the whole meal."
That is the beauty of this narrative - it is just one tasty morsel after another.
Product details
- ASIN : B005EH3BP0
- Publisher : NYRB Classics; Reprint edition (November 9, 2011)
- Publication date : November 9, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 19992 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 420 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0719566843
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,156,682 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #103 in Literary Travel
- #614 in Literary & Religious Travel Guides
- #1,737 in Travel Writing
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, a geographer and writer, is the author of "Island People: The Caribbean and the World," and the co-editor of "Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas." He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and his work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, The Nation, Artforum, and The Believer, among many other publications. He lives in New York and is a scholar in residence at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, where he also teaches.
http://www.joshuajellyschapiro.com
@jellyschapiro
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book interesting and informative about the Caribbean. They appreciate the detail and cultural gems in it. Readers describe it as thorough and providing a good background to what is happening there today. However, opinions differ on the writing style - some find it well-written and poetic, while others feel it's outdated or flowery.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book interesting and informative. They appreciate the detail and wonder of the author's work. The book is described as a delightful read with good experiences and history.
"...The detailed history which Fermor gives of each island is always fascinating and well-told, and helps to put the sights, sounds, smells he..." Read more
"In this delightful tome, Patrick Leigh Fermor takes us to a number of Caribbean islands in the post-war, pre-tourism era; and in so doing he..." Read more
"...trying to read it and get through it because it has so much information about history and is filled with beautiful poetic language and words and..." Read more
"Interesting read if you are fond of the Caribbean but some sections are obvious, painfully over-written, almost like high school creative writing..." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's detail on Caribbean culture. They find it thorough and provide a real background to what is happening there today. The author's skill in observation and writing are appreciated.
"...gives of each island is always fascinating and well-told, and helps to put the sights, sounds, smells he encounters into a deeper context, lending..." Read more
"...in the Caribbean -- only a handful -- but in that handful he dishes out detail and cultural gems of a Caribbean that no longer exists...." Read more
"Give it time and it gets more detailed and overall better." Read more
"...I have read all of his work published to date. This book is the most thorough I have ever seen on Caribbean culture and even though written in..." Read more
Customers have different views on the writing style. Some find it well-written with poetic language and subjects they've never heard before. Others feel the word choice is outdated, flowery, and overwritten.
"...yet, he is anything but smug or bluff, but rather singularly self-effacing in all his writing, falling in love, or yearning to do so, with everyone..." Read more
"...you are fond of the Caribbean but some sections are obvious, painfully over-written, almost like high school creative writing class." Read more
"...it has so much information about history and is filled with beautiful poetic language and words and subjects I've never heard before." Read more
"...passed on at age 92 but the quality of his observation then skill in writing is amazing. I have read all of his work published to date...." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2011Paddy Fermor is an absolutely sui-generis person and writer. This post-war account of his travels through the Caribbean isles comes on the heels of his service with the SOE behind enemy lines in Greece and Crete where he, amongst other things, was the only agent - of whom I am aware - to capture a Nazi General single-handedly, in occupied Greece. And yet, he is anything but smug or bluff, but rather singularly self-effacing in all his writing, falling in love, or yearning to do so, with everyone and, more significantly here, every place where he sojourns and giving the people and the place centre-stage. Also, he refrains from even a hint of talking down to the reader and gives him/her conversations in the French Créole patois as he hears them, and weaves his erudition into the lush writing in a manner which involves the reader with a particular island's lore and history in a mesmerising, rather than off-putting manner. The detailed history which Fermor gives of each island is always fascinating and well-told, and helps to put the sights, sounds, smells he encounters into a deeper context, lending the reader his own deep sense of atavism such as one usually only encounters in works of great literature, such as the best of Conrad and Powys.
It is quite beyond the scope of a review such as this one to attempt to impart Fermor's experience on each of the islands, or to compare or to contrast them. There is this book for that! It is even beyond the scope of this reviewer to delve the into Fermor's impressionistic, Romantic mindset, for Fermor does it much better himself describing Martinique:
"We rose to leave when the rain abated, and found that the moon had broken through the clouds. The garden was a faint constellation of flowers that were only distinguishable by their pallor from the darkness. Under the dripping mango trees, tier on tier of lawn descended into the darkness. The air was warm and scented, and the forest, faintly rimmed with silver, completely surrounded this high, sloping world. The singing of some Negro women floated up from the village with the echo of the falling waves and the faint gasp of the shingle.
Moments like this fill one with gratitude; not necessarily so much because of their incidental beauty, but because of the understanding they bring; they act as a Rosetta stone to a whole system of hieroglyphs. That house, those lights and voices and flowers and smells and sounds, I felt, gave me a better chance of grasping the atmosphere, the scope and mood of Créole life in the Antilles than a library full of memoirs and chronicles."
Not to the exclusion of memoirs and chronicles, to be sure, but the reader must surely succumb to the poetic nuances of Fermor's prose to grasp this enchanted Rosetta stone and develop a sixth sense as to places and people in the reading of this unique labour of love.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2012In this delightful tome, Patrick Leigh Fermor takes us to a number of Caribbean islands in the post-war, pre-tourism era; and in so doing he burnishes his reputation as perhaps the best travel writer of modern times. To his credit, Fermor does not attempt to hit all the islands in the Caribbean -- only a handful -- but in that handful he dishes out detail and cultural gems of a Caribbean that no longer exists. There are few cruise ships and opulent hotels in Fermor's Caribbean. Rather, there are societies that have been shaped by geography, the invasion of European settlers in the Age of Exploration and, perhaps most of all, the bitter disaster of centuries of slavery. Fermor delves into these influences with great gusto and incredible detail. Of particular note are his several chapters on Haiti, which focus mainly on Voodooism, which so defines the turbulent history of the country. His description of the many facets of that mysterious belief system are definitive. In his first books, "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water", Fermor, walking from The Netherlands to Istanbul, described in chilling detail a Europe about to be smashed by World War II. In "The Traveller's Tree" he gives us a region about to be forever altered by tourism. It's a book rich in detail and wonder -- testament to this legendary travel writer's skill.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2024Give it time and it gets more detailed and overall better.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2024This is an Incredible Book I am a readaholic and I'm still trying to read it and get through it because it has so much information about history and is filled with beautiful poetic language and words and subjects I've never heard before.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2013Interesting read if you are fond of the Caribbean but some sections are obvious, painfully over-written, almost like high school creative writing class.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2014Sadly Mr. Fermor has passed on at age 92 but the quality of his observation then skill in writing is amazing. I have read all of his work published to date. This book is the most thorough I have ever seen on Caribbean culture and even though written in 1947 it provides the real background to what is happening there today. A delight to read - never boring and his other works are equally edifying. Be sure to make notes of the words you don't know the meaning of - you will be amazed at his word choices once you look them up! Great teacher.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2017This is a superb travel essay book. It deals with the undeveloped Caribbean just after WW II. Leigh Fermor's prose i strikingly evocative..
- Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2017WHAT A GEM OF A RETRO TRAVEL BOOK. WILDLY POLITICALLY INCORRECT IN PLACES = WRITTEN IN ANOTHER ERA. ARMCHAIR TRAVEL THE WEST INDIES OF THE CARIBBEAN THE WAY THEY WERE BEFORE TOURISM.
Top reviews from other countries
- Tony EarlyReviewed in Australia on September 4, 2021
4.0 out of 5 stars Fermor in the Carribean
Paddy’s highly descriptive style is given full rein here and is only amplified in his subsequent works of my acquaintance.
- Terry DReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 26, 2013
5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliantly written story of a Caribbean island odyssey
As I - and many other reviewers - have remarked Patrick Leigh Fermor had the enviable ability to write near-lyrical prose. But he went much further and, as an historian and a skilful observer of people, his books are always engrossing, entertaining and informative.
In the preface to 'The Traveller's Tree' (written in the late 1940s) he cautions that it must not 'be mistaken for a guide to the Caribbean. It is nothing more than a personal, random account of an autumn and winter spent wandering through some of the islands ... its ultimate purpose, if it must be defined, is to retransmit to the reader whatever interest and enjoyment we encountered. In a word, to give pleasure.'
It's an accurate caveat for a book that explores the vastly different religions, languages, history, culture, agriculture and geography of several of the Caribbean islands. Leigh Fermor's description of witnessing a day-long Voodoo festival, along with a brief foray into the (hopefully now defunct) practices and rites of cannibalism, is matched by an insightful summary of the slave trade and the effect it - together with the Spanish, French, and English privateers - had on the last 200 year's history of the various islands.
Like all his other books it's an intriguing and highly enjoyable story.
I must, however, admit to being somewhat amused by the convoluted sequence of his island hopping. As any map of the Caribbean will show, Guadeloupe to Dominica via Martinique isn't a particularly logical route. Particularly when followed - again in sequence - by Barbados, Trinidad, several of the Leeward Islands and then, finally to Haiti and Jamaica.
Perhaps some of the cruise lines ought to to consider this as an itinerary?
Read and enjoy. And, if you haven't already read A Time of Gifts - from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube and Between the Woods and the Water - from the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates, go treat yourself!
- Kevin FletcherReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 9, 2019
4.0 out of 5 stars His prose is utterly delightful. It's like eating chocolate cake!
I discovered Patrick Leigh Fermour's brilliant books around 10 years ago. His wonderful prose and attention to detail is second to none. This is his first ever book, written in the '50s, and though if it's age, the germ of his writing style is clearly there. ✔️
- J G HReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2014
5.0 out of 5 stars Don't visit the Caribbean without this book!
Patrick Leigh Fermor's book, though written some sixty years ago, remains the unsurpassed prose masterpiece about the archipelago of islands that make up the Antilles. It describes in fascinating and erudite detail the peoples, the societies and the cultures that took over this region after Columbus 'discovered' it in 1492, and which still colour it today.
- David CroughtonReviewed in the United Kingdom on June 15, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Joy
Sheer joy and pleasure reading Paddys first book! A master.It has inspired me to read and learn more about the Caribbean