Signed presentation inscription: “To Romain Gary, with many greetings from Patrick Leigh Fermor. Jan. 1959.”
The second book published by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani was published in London the same year that The Roots of Heaven, directed by John Huston, was released — a film for which he wrote the screenplay together with Romain Gary. It was the first time one of Gary’s novels had been adapted for the screen.
The book recounts the explorations of the Fermor couple — Patrick and Joan, to whom the book is dedicated — among the steep rocks of the Mani (Magne in French), one of the wildest and most isolated regions of Greece, at the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese, as far as Cape Matapan, where mythology places one of the entrances to Hades, seeking out the least visited sites. The author called it the “opposite of a travel guide.”
On the occasion of his knighthood in 2004, awarded by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature and to relations between the United Kingdom and Greece, it was written: “Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor is a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond (he is in fact mentioned in chapter 2 of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel Live and Let Die, published in 1954) and Graham Greene.”