It’s been nice surprise to stumble upon this academic essay by Grzegorz Moroz in Viatica, available in English and French, which analyses Walking the Woods and the Water as an ‘intertextual journey’ following Patrick Leigh Fermor’s own trudge to Istanbul. I’m gratified to have had someone engaging so closely with the text – and honoured that it compares so favorably with Leigh Fermor’s own writing.
“Hunt’s book, with its extremely strong intertextual and paratextual reliance on Leigh Fermor’s trilogy, and with Hunt’s persona following (almost step by step) the ‘great trudge’ of his predecessor, is on the one hand a tribute and a homage to Leigh Fermor’s trilogy, and on the other it is ‘a second journey’ par excellence in Leavenworth’s meaning of the term. At the same time, as I am going to argue in the second part of this essay, it is also a very good contemporary British peripatetic travel book in its own right.”