Items related to Bruce Chatwin
Award-winning novelist Nicholas Shakespeare has written the definitive biography of one of the most influential literary figures of our time: Bruce Chatwin, whose works’ strangely compelling combination of research, first-hand experience, myth, and mystification may have been the real substance of his seemingly contradictory life.
Chatwin’s first book, In Patagonia, became an international bestseller, revived the art of travel writing, and inspired a generation to set out in search of adventure. Chatwin became a celebrity, while remaining a conundrum. With little formal education, he had become a director of Sotheby’s. An avid collector, he eschewed material things and revered the nomadic life. Married for twenty-three years, he had male lovers throughout the world. And only at his death did his personal myth fail him. Nicholas Shakespeare, who was given unrestricted access to his papers, spent eight years retracing Chatwin’s steps and interviewing the people who knew him. The result is a biography that is at once sympathetic and revelatory.
Chatwin’s first book, In Patagonia, became an international bestseller, revived the art of travel writing, and inspired a generation to set out in search of adventure. Chatwin became a celebrity, while remaining a conundrum. With little formal education, he had become a director of Sotheby’s. An avid collector, he eschewed material things and revered the nomadic life. Married for twenty-three years, he had male lovers throughout the world. And only at his death did his personal myth fail him. Nicholas Shakespeare, who was given unrestricted access to his papers, spent eight years retracing Chatwin’s steps and interviewing the people who knew him. The result is a biography that is at once sympathetic and revelatory.
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Review:
Bruce Chatwin was the golden child of the contemporary English novel; by the time he died of an AIDS-related illness aged 49 in January 1989 he had produced the startlingly original masterpieces that made his name. Chatwin came late to being a published writer; In Patagonia, his instant classic of what can loosely be termed "travel literature", came out in 1977. In the preceding years this precocious, intense figure had been an art specialist at Sotheby's, a journalist with the Sunday Times, an archaeologist and a restless, questing traveller. By the time his novel of studying the Aboriginal dreamtime in Australia, The Songlines, was published, he had gained a worldwide audience.
Review:
An obsessive art collector, Chatwin also acquired people as he did fabulous objects. He took both male and female lovers while continuing to remain married to his wife Elizabeth, seemingly the most enduring relationship of his life. It is her cooperation and tenacity which enabled this biography to come about, as well as Nicholas Shakespeare's exhaustive research (the book was eight years in the making), and his countless interviews with friends and acquaintances from all corners of the globe. It is the international span of Chatwin's experiences that make the reader appreciate his desire to know all cultures and disciplines.
There is some excellent, evocative writing here, particularly in Shakespeare's account of Chatwin's last weeks, his disappointment at not winning the Booker Prize for Utz lifting when a friend told him of acclaimed Italian novelist Alberto Moravia's glowing review of the book in a newspaper. In particular, the detailed passage describing Chatwin's awful, miserable death surrounded by friends and family is harrowing yet moving to read. There are a plethora of adjectives used to describe Chatwin; the list generally includes words such as "elusive", "mercurial", and "charismatic". Yet what Nicholas Shakespeare brings across in this immense, excellent life of Chatwin is the complete aloneness of the man, an at times almost impenetrable solitude. He was a flamboyant fabulist, an unparalleled conversationalist, yet, as the Australian poet Les Murray is quoted as saying: "He was lonely and he wanted to be. He had those blue, implacable eyes that said: "I will reject you, I will forget you, because neither you nor any other human being can give me what I want".--Catherine Taylor
"In Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin has found the right biographer. This is a magnificent work of empathy and detection."--Colin Thubron, "The Sunday Times" (London) "An epic work of immense satisfaction. In awe-inspiring detail and with a rounding-out of all the other characters, Shakespeare takes us successively through the milieux of Chatwin's life--and drenches all these worlds in their emotional, human implications."--Duncan Fallowell, "The Times" (London) "Biographies don't come any better than this. Eight years in the writing, Bruce Chatwin is a glorious quilt-work of texts, voices, and places, joined together with consummate judgment."--Justin Wintle, "Financial Times" (London) "Nicholas Shakespeare's biography feels concise: comprehensively researched, elegantly written, perfectly balanced between the life, the books, and the ideas."--Blake Morrison, "Independent on Sunday"
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- ISBN 10 0099290081
- ISBN 13 9780099290087
- BindingUnknown Binding
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