Dear NYRB

On Patrick Leigh Fermor’s time at a Benedictine abbey near Rouen:

“Then he started to sleep. He slept until a few meals and church services a day were his only lucid moments. Then the pattern changed again. His lassitude dwindled away and was succeeded by a ‘limpid freshness.’ He now slept only five hours in twenty-four. It was as if a profound tiredness, rooted in the outside world with its demands on nervous libido and instant response, had overswept him, then receded in this quietude to release a flood of unimpeded energy. ‘Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away.’”
—from Colin Thubron’s review of Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence (and four other of his travel books)

As I was falling asleep, and thinking that perhaps I should get all five—in lieu of the abbey, which is clearly actually what I need—I suddenly thought, Wait. Isn’t this some kind of racket? Wonderful absorbing review in the NYRB of five books published by NYRB.

Or does the excellence of both the books and the review absolve them?

Oh, perhaps it does.