Transylvania and Beyond: A Travel Memoir

by Dervla Murphy

Book Overview

Dervla Murphy spent eight months in Transylvania - and beyond - sharing the everyday lives of ordinary Rumanians. Her book describes a journey on two levels - wandering through the remotest corners of the Carpathians, on foot or by bicycle, and into the often daunting mental terrain of a post-Communist society where nothing was quite what it seemed.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879516038
• ISBN13: 9780879516031
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: Overlook Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 2.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher

Customer Reviews

Dervla Murphy: Romania unvarnished - make mine a double.

Dervla Murphy travels by bicycle, mule, or foot, then comes back to tell all - warts and all. She has courage and integrity - and a disarmingly unmannered charm - and deploys these gifts in each of her books to capture the immediacy and difficult beauty of landscapes and peoples often on the wrong side of "progress".From her first day - robbed of her belongings, save for a couple bottles of Irish whiskey - Ms Murphy takes the reader on a journey into the tormented soul of Transylvania, a beautiful land of forests and mountains, fought over by Hungarians, Germans, Szekelys, and Romanians for centuries. She shares her impressions of land and people, not with an air of authority, but rather with a sense of candour and compassion. Perhaps too abrupt, sometimes wrong-headedly opinionated, but a single cussed Murphy sentence as often as not trumps a bookshelf-load of expert opinions.If you do NOT enjoy unbridled enthusiasm, a thirst for adventure and local hooch, obstinate cussedness in the face of know-it-alls and tiresome do-gooders, then do NOT read these books. If you DO enjoy these traits, and wish to spend a very pleasant evening or two with an engaging woman, do read Dervla Murphy's books (by all means start with "Full Tilt", her classic first book).

Raw, uncensored & ecclectic

Murphy's mobile diary captures Romania in all its splendor and squalor. Refreshingingly opinionated, she rushes the reality of Romania into your face and beyond!