Patrick Leigh Fermor, An Adventure. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

Patrick Leigh Fermor walked across a continent when he was eighteen, dated a princess, and kidnapped a German general. He published eight books about his adventures during his lifetime, and there might be more on the way. He was an irascible bon vivant and an excellent writer.

Fermor is a national treasure and a legend on the other side of the Atlantic, and for the past few years NYRB Classics has been reissuing his memoirs (A Time of Gifts, Mani, A Time to Keep Silence) in handsome paperbacks for readers in the United States. This all makes it almost hard to believe that reading words about Fermor that weren’t written by Fermor himself could be anything but a letdown.

Artemis Cooper’s new Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure not only acquits itself quite nicely, it occasionally surpasses Fermor’s work in excitement and clarity. One of Fermor’s best qualities was his casual self-mythologizing, which cast his books in a beautiful nimbus of legend. Cooper celebrates the life, but cuts through the haze a bit, offering correctives and giving the big picture of the grand life with a forward-moving narrative that captures the man, his times, and the many lands he traveled.

In Cooper’s book we're treated to Fermor's prismatic life, including the reckless schoolboy, tireless traveler, iconoclast, professional freeloader, and the unlikely soldier. A reader would be tempted to disbelieve some of it if Cooper weren’t such a strong and level-headed writer herself. Fermor may have had no shortage of things to say about himself, but in Cooper’s book we see that he was probably justified.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, An Adventure. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.