Bruce ChatwinCríticas

This is an ample selection of essays and notes taken from Chatwin's adventures in life. He was a romantic adventurer and a confident writer; he spoke succinctly about what he observed. He never gives the impression of being overbearing in his observations of the people he interviewed and met. Luckily for us he had a curiosity that allowed us all to share in personalities, historical oddities and places off the beaten track.
A worthwhile book to have in your library.

This really is a book to get lost in, and it has had an immense influence overseas in popularising Aboriginal Australian culture. (Rory Stewart, for instance, recalls this book as the one that made English travel writing "cool".) A rambling yarn, tangents upon tangents, unpleasant viewpoints and hopeful ideas mingling together like dyes being poured into a vat.

The situation is more complex now - some would say problematic but I'd argue that's going too far. Chatwin's time in Australia was fairly brief, his subjects sometimes ironic or perhaps even outright false (to be fair, he acknowledges this), and his attempt to understand an issue that Australians themselves were still grappling with in the 1980s was always going to be deeply flawed. Still, it has its place in the history, and its rather basic overview of one particular aspect of Aboriginal life - even if it is drawn without any shadow or nuance - is an intriguing viewpoint on Australia from an outsider.

I loved this book. It made me want to visit Wales, and to cook some of the food that they were eating.

Chatwin takes us on a journey few will ever have the opportunity to match.

Very interesting read, fascinating, and quite wonderful. Chatwin interweaves his journey to observe a territorial issue between aboriginal tribes and a proposed train line, with thoughts, science, history, myth, lore, of all peoples origins in song. Life is a songline in which we doing ourselves, and all the things, into existence. Really interesting segue into the theories of human violence (innately offensive, defensive? A result of population and/or resources only—counter intuitively the less a people has the less violent they are, fascinating stuff). Personable and full of the quality I most love in humans and my limited ideas of "aboriginals": a sense of joy.

Un clásico de la literatura de viajes que parte de las entrañas familiares del autor para convertirse en la búsqueda de los vestigios de una historia insólita.
Todos necesitan del acicate de una busca para vivir; para el viajero ese acicate reside en cualquier sueño», decía Bruce Chatwin. Aquí la excusa para el sueño y para el viaje es un trozo de piel de diez centímetros cuadrados entregado a su abuela como regalo de bodas por un primo marino, exiliado en los confi nes del Imperio Británico. La historia familiar tenía la piel por la de un brontosaurio, aunque era de color rojo y estaba cubierta de pelo. Bruce Chatwin parte tras la
pista de una piel similar y encuentra los vestigios de siglos de historia y las insólitas huellas de personajes improbables.

Exiliados y excéntricos de toda especie, vagabundos y descendientes de vagabundos, hombres y mujeres encallados en el tiempo dan una extraordinaria vivacidad a este libro espléndido, a este clásico de hoy.

Hmmm. Didnt know what to expect from my first "Bruce Chatwin", but this wasnt it. Lots of little snippits - most chapters less than 2 pages long - I got very little idea of Patagonia as a place, there seemed to be very little focus or a line being followed.[return][return]Plenty of characters but couldnt tell how they related to each other (if at all) or how they related to Chatwin. Most interesting things were the longer chapters, such as those on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who spent several years in Patagonia before disappearing off into the sunset

My first read of Chatwin's writing, and this book turns out to have been his last. The essays are grouped under titles, such as "Friends", which includes Diana Vreeland. "Encounters" includes a wild memoir of being in Africa with Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski as they filmed a movie. He also writes of nomads, French fashion designer Madeleine Vionnet in Paris, and meeting a "wolf-boy" in India in 1978.
Reading Chatwin's essays is like getting an education about the world of the last 35 years of the 20th Century. He sought out the rare and unusual, often focusing on one person, or a small group, to tell the story of how they live. I'll look for more from him.

An unnamed narrator tells the story of Meissen porcelain collector/obsessive Kasper Utz. Set mostly in Prague, the narrator, who has only met Utz once, reveals his own obsession with the eccentric ‘trickster’ and his life, and on the way we learn a lot about the origins of porcelain as well as the tumultuous time in 1960s Prague.

Always with Chatwin one has to be aware that he was a mythologiser (as well as a self-mythologiser), and the complaint many have is that you can never know what element of his novels have some validity/fact/truth in them. It is not something that has ever bothered me. If I become fascinated with a subject he weaves a spell over, I go find a non-fiction book to learn. Like Tolstoy, I don’t think he himself called any of his books one thing or another, ie he never described any of them as novels per se. I’d recommend his essays (or some would say short stories).

As with his own life, when he became ill, he said that it was because he had eaten a thousand year old egg in China, when in actual fact he had HIV/AIDS. Even in pending death he wanted to embellish his life. I have never come away from any of his work without being spell bound by something he has written, and I have reread most of it several times.

Excellent. I'm glad I read this after travelling Patagonia, so that I was sharing the author's reactions to the places and freshening memories, instead of just settings expectations. Plenty of interesting stories in their own right; I just enjoyed the moments of recognition on top of it.

Di Chatwin - di cui non conosco i libri di viaggio - ho amato molto Utz, con la sua concisa perfezione di racconto. Sulla collina nera non ne condivide la sintesi, costruendo una lunga e densa epopea familiare in cui i due gemelli protagonisti attraversano un secolo restando apparentemente loro stessi mentre intorno è il mondo a cambiare. A mio avviso Chatwin calca troppo la mano con le simbologie fra mondo degli uomini e mondo della natura e, soprattutto, inserisce un avvicendamento di troppi personaggi, la funzione dei quali è spesso, nel loro rapido comparire e sparire, eccessivamente meccanica. Questo fa sì che il romanzo finisca per risultare troppo “costruito” e troppo poco naturale, a sfavore del piacere di lettura.

Leggere Chatwin era molto in voga nei primi anni '90, quelli immediatamente successivi alla sua scomparsa. Benché fossi nei miei anni più formativi quanto a letture (e benché qualcuno mi avesse regalato una maglietta con la scritta "what am I doing here"), ho sempre snobbato Chatwin archiviandolo nella categoria della letteratura di viaggio. A lui arrivo oggi grazie a Fredrik Sjöberg che in L'arte di collezionare mosche cita Utz per via dell'enfasi sul collezionismo e di una battuta su un menu di ristorante in cui l'inglese "carp" è reso come "crap", con tutte le conseguenze del caso. Arrivo quindi a questo libro sull'onda di una connessione letteraria (quale miglior modo?) senza aspettative precise e vi trovo un grandissimo piacere di lettura (che fa rimpiangere la brevità del libro), una struttura a incastri/digressioni perfetta e una scrittura pregevole. Leggendolo, penso a quanto la storia potrebbe prestarsi a un film; in seguito scopro che il film c'è già, del 1992 (lo cercherò). Scopro anche che questo è l'ultimo libro di Chatwin, scritto durante la malattia che lo avrebbe condotto alla morte, il che rende ancora più eccezionale e sorprendente la vitalità che emana da ogni sua pagina.

A quiet atmospheric tale of character and place; the place being a farm on the Welsh/English border and the characters a set of twins, their parents and neighbors.

Todos necesitan del acicate de una busca para vivir; para el viajero ese acicate reside en cualquier sueño», decía Bruce Chatwin. Aquí la excusa para el sueño y para el viaje es un trozo de piel de diez centímetros cuadrados entregado a su abuela como regalo de bodas por un primo marino, exiliado en los confines del Imperio Británico. La historia familiar tenía la piel por la de un Brontosaurio, aunque era de color rojo y estaba cubierta de pelo. Bruce Chatwin parte tras la pista de una piel similar y encuentra los vestigios de siglos de historia y las insólitas huellas de personajes improbables.

I'm curious that Chatwin considered this book fiction; perhaps by today's standards we'd brand it "creative nonfiction" the "creative" part being perhaps invented or doctored dialogue, some bending of facts to get at a more truthful narrative, etc. As a travel document, though, it maintains Chatwin's compressed ability to sketch a character or paint a landscape in a few deft strokes. And the book continues what appears to be his life-long thesis: that humans are meant to be in motion, to be migratory, to travel, mirroring the own way he lived his life.

The book takes an interesting turn just past the half-way mark when Chatwin as his own character is holed up in his caravan due to the rains and decides to finally tackle his "Paris" or moleskin notebooks: "I had a presentiment that the 'travelling' phase of my life might be passing. I felt, before the malaise of settlement crept over me, that I should reopen those notebooks. I should set down on paper a resume of the ideas, quotations and encounters which had amused and obsessed me; and which I hoped would shed light on what is, for me, the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness."

And indeed most of the rest of the book are his quotes and musings from his notebooks, at times a philosophical inquiry into our evolutionary origins, the evidence that our early adversaries were the big cats, why babies quiet down when they are walked given they were carried in slings on their mother's backs, that we are not murderous by nature reflecting on the Cain and Abel myth-story, and so on through language and poetry, the naming of the things of the world as we pass them on our journeys and sing them into being.

There is plenty more in this book for a reader: the colonial and post-colonial undertones of the British and American empires vs. the aboriginal tribes, their "progress" of train lines and mining and for the Americans military sites coming into conflict with the sacred spots, the "dream sites" and "dream lines" of the land; the quite complicated and sophisticated means of communication between the different tribes based on their dream songs; and Chatwin's own memories of his other travels, in Africa and elsewhere around the world, illuminating the connections and similarities within the very different human experiences that coexist on the planet. And there's plenty of room to analyze Chatwin's own positions and relationships to his subjects; as sympathetic and open as he portrays himself in character-narrator form to the "other", he is white and from the empire center, and so there's room to question his framing and way of seeing.

To end, a great book; only thing I found jarring was the sudden shift from the narrative of his travels to the philosophical inquiry into his notebooks. There are moments where he returns to the characters and narrative he set up in the first half of the book throughout the journal musings, and the two parts clearly speak to each other, but by the end I felt like I was reading two different books. Still, there's so much good stuff here I'd recommend to all.

Wonderfully written story of Australia.

Published in 1977, this book is a mix of history and travel diary. Bruce Chatwin starts in Buenos Aires, and travels down Argentina, crossing the region known as Patagonia. He stops to visit people along the way, asks them questions about their family histories and the events that occurred in the area. We hear many immigration stories and local legends. Chatwin supplements what he hears from the people he meets with his own historical research.

It is all reasonably interesting, but there is little organization or narrative arc. As he travels, he jumps from one topic to the next in a series of extremely short chapters. We hear a lot about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who apparently owned a cabin in the region. We get a description of the landscape and see photos from his travels. There are descriptions of extinct giant sloths. We learn the story of Jemmy Button, an indigenous person taken in 1830 from Tierra del Fuego, who traveled on the HMS Beagle. These are just a few examples of many vignettes.

This is a memoir with very little introspection or analysis. He repeats historical stories that have been debunked as myths. I found lots of side dishes to enjoy, but it seems lacking in a main course.

Interessante Sache das alles mit den Songlines. Chatwin selbst, ich weiss nicht ob es sein Stil ist oder ob es an der Übersetzung liegt, trägt manchmal sehr dick auf.
So wird z.B. aus Altenberg bei Wien, wo er Konrad Lorenz besucht hat (und ihm natürlich neue Erkenntnisse gelehrt hat) eine "Stadt in der Steppe, über die heisser Wind weht".
Wen er schon aus dem Tullner Becken eine Steppe macht, kann man sich auch Übertreibungen an anderen Stellen gut vorstellen.

It was, frankly, astonishing that Chatwin was able to achieve so much with so little. His novellas, including this and "The Viceroy of Ouidah", rival his travel writing for majesty and atmosphere. A great talent taken from us too early by far.

Very good.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this book.
A fascinating account of this virtually unknown part of world told essentially by reference to literary excerpts.
The early Welsh settlers' story is told, as is an alternative history of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and perhaps how the western view of Hell was formed!

Interesting fictionalised story of farming twins growing up on the Herefordshire-Wales border between 1900 and 1980s.

This is a beautiful, quietly written book with an old soul. Set on a Welsh mountain side, it's a moving account of the bond between twin brothers who live at Black Hill farm throughout the entirety of their lives, and the often fraught relationships between family members and nearest neighbours.

I really enjoyed this gentle novel. Reminding me of a cross between Thomas Hardy's and Kent Haruf's writing, it was emotive and moving with well executed characters trying to make ends meet in the rural isolation of the Welsh mountains.

For anyone who's already read this and enjoyed it, I thoroughly recommend Horatio Clare's memoir Running for the Hills. It has a very similar setting on a Welsh mountain farm and real-life eccentric rural characters. I kept thinking of it as I read this book (to the extent that I wonder did it heavily influence Clare's own book).

4.5 stars - a wonderful read. Highly recommended.½

Pretty decent novella. Originally intended to be a non-fiction biography of a famous slave trader. The author felt he hadn't managed to get hold of enough facts so changed a couple of names and published it as fiction.

A very rich and vivid descriptive style. But its still essentially a biography an i'm not a big fan of bio's.
Many books are more fun to 'have read' than 'to be reading' this is the opposite. Fun to read due to the style but didn't feel like i took away too much from the experience. Also quite short.

No way would any want to go to a run down post-Colonial wild west lawlessness. . . but then that was in the mid 1970S. . . Has anything changed?
A truly interesting book. . .
Clears up what happened to 'The Sundance Kid' as well. . .