At the Brink of the Abyss: Incredibility and the Rhetoric of Truth-Telling in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts

This article argues that Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (1977) is characterised by a deep and unresolved tension between the deployment truth-telling rhetoric – textual appeals to readerly credulity customarily such as acknowledgements limits authorial memory inclusion excerpts from journals literal incredibility its detail. further complication introduced in text his youthful notionally unedited but fact partially fictionalised, revealed an examination archives. Though typically regarded nonfiction, is, argues, highly ambiguous for which neither ‘fact convention’ nor ‘aesthetic are adequate modes reception.