Items related to Bruce Chatwin
"Unimprovable (and unstoppably readable)"
--Pico Iyer, Time
"Moving and elegant...A superb portrayal of the restless and randy travel writer brings us as close to his hidden heart as we're likely to get."
--Salon.com
"Shakespeare's engrossing bio does exactly what Chatwin's fans have longed to do: get beneath the alluring but elusive quality of his persona and prose. [Grade]: 'A'"
--Entertainment Weekly
"Immensely readable... Shakespeare portrays a man of colossal energies and intellect in perpetual conflict, whose life was a web of contradiction, controversy, and conundrum.... Shakespeare artfully synthesizes what could have been cacophonous voices into an impressively rendered and remarkably coherent portrait."
--Vogue
"Quite simply, one of the most beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and cleverly constructed biographies written this decade. Shakespeare has a quite extraordinary empathy for his subject, whom he portrays with humor, warmth, and an eye for telling detail, creating a book almost as original, intelligent, and observant as those by Chatwin himself."
--William Dalrymple, Literary Review (London)
Bruce Chatwin burst onto the literary landscape in 1977 with In Patagonia, which quickly became one of the most influential travel books of the twentieth century. The books that followed-- The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, and Utz--confirmed his status as a major writer able to reinvent himself constantly. And the life he led successfully established him as one of the most charismatic and elusive literary figures of our time.
Beautiful to behold, charming, intelligent, a writer of exquisite prose, Chatwin was welcome in every society--from the most glamorous patrons of Sotheby's, where he held his first job, to the remote tribes of Africa. He was a thinker of striking originality, a reader of astonishing breadth and depth, and a mesmerizing storyteller. Salman Rushdie claimed that "he had the most erudite and possibly the most brilliant mind I ever came across."
And yet for all the adoration he received, when Chatwin died of AIDS in 1989, he died an enigma, a panoply of apparently conflicting identities. Married for twenty-three years to his American wife, Elizabeth, he was also an active homosexual. A socialite who loved to regale his rich and famous friends with uproariously funny stories about his travels and the people he met on them, he was at heart a single-minded loner who explored the limits of extreme solitude.
Award-winning novelist Nicholas Shakespeare spent eight years traveling across five continents in Chatwin's footsteps. He was given unrestricted access to Chatwin's private notebooks, diaries, and letters, and has gathered evidence from Chatwin's peers, his friends, his family, his hosts, his enemies, and his lovers. The result is this masterful biography, rendered in a graceful narrative that brilliantly leads us into Chatwin's world--across all the vast geographic, social, and emotional expanses that he traveled--and into his psyche.
Beautiful to behold, charming, intelligent, a writer of exquisite prose, Chatwin was welcome in every society--from the most glamorous patrons of Sotheby's, where he held his first job, to the remote tribes of Africa. He was a thinker of striking originality, a reader of astonishing erudition, and a mesmerizing storyteller. Although married for twenty-three years to his American wife, Elizabeth, he was also an active homosexual, but at heart, a loner.
Acclaimed novelist Nicholas Shakespeare spent eight years traveling in Chatwin's footsteps. The result is this definitive biography rendered in a graceful narrative that brilliantly leads us into Chatwin's world, from the glittering dinner tables among the famous to foreign deserts among nomads, and into his psyche. -->
--Pico Iyer, Time
"Moving and elegant...A superb portrayal of the restless and randy travel writer brings us as close to his hidden heart as we're likely to get."
--Salon.com
"Shakespeare's engrossing bio does exactly what Chatwin's fans have longed to do: get beneath the alluring but elusive quality of his persona and prose. [Grade]: 'A'"
--Entertainment Weekly
"Immensely readable... Shakespeare portrays a man of colossal energies and intellect in perpetual conflict, whose life was a web of contradiction, controversy, and conundrum.... Shakespeare artfully synthesizes what could have been cacophonous voices into an impressively rendered and remarkably coherent portrait."
--Vogue
"Quite simply, one of the most beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and cleverly constructed biographies written this decade. Shakespeare has a quite extraordinary empathy for his subject, whom he portrays with humor, warmth, and an eye for telling detail, creating a book almost as original, intelligent, and observant as those by Chatwin himself."
--William Dalrymple, Literary Review (London)
Bruce Chatwin burst onto the literary landscape in 1977 with In Patagonia, which quickly became one of the most influential travel books of the twentieth century. The books that followed-- The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, and Utz--confirmed his status as a major writer able to reinvent himself constantly. And the life he led successfully established him as one of the most charismatic and elusive literary figures of our time.
Beautiful to behold, charming, intelligent, a writer of exquisite prose, Chatwin was welcome in every society--from the most glamorous patrons of Sotheby's, where he held his first job, to the remote tribes of Africa. He was a thinker of striking originality, a reader of astonishing breadth and depth, and a mesmerizing storyteller. Salman Rushdie claimed that "he had the most erudite and possibly the most brilliant mind I ever came across."
And yet for all the adoration he received, when Chatwin died of AIDS in 1989, he died an enigma, a panoply of apparently conflicting identities. Married for twenty-three years to his American wife, Elizabeth, he was also an active homosexual. A socialite who loved to regale his rich and famous friends with uproariously funny stories about his travels and the people he met on them, he was at heart a single-minded loner who explored the limits of extreme solitude.
Award-winning novelist Nicholas Shakespeare spent eight years traveling across five continents in Chatwin's footsteps. He was given unrestricted access to Chatwin's private notebooks, diaries, and letters, and has gathered evidence from Chatwin's peers, his friends, his family, his hosts, his enemies, and his lovers. The result is this masterful biography, rendered in a graceful narrative that brilliantly leads us into Chatwin's world--across all the vast geographic, social, and emotional expanses that he traveled--and into his psyche.
Beautiful to behold, charming, intelligent, a writer of exquisite prose, Chatwin was welcome in every society--from the most glamorous patrons of Sotheby's, where he held his first job, to the remote tribes of Africa. He was a thinker of striking originality, a reader of astonishing erudition, and a mesmerizing storyteller. Although married for twenty-three years to his American wife, Elizabeth, he was also an active homosexual, but at heart, a loner.
Acclaimed novelist Nicholas Shakespeare spent eight years traveling in Chatwin's footsteps. The result is this definitive biography rendered in a graceful narrative that brilliantly leads us into Chatwin's world, from the glittering dinner tables among the famous to foreign deserts among nomads, and into his psyche. -->
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Product Description:
Review:
Bruce Chatwin's death from AIDS in 1989 brought a meteoric career to an abrupt end, since he burst onto the literary scene in 1977 with his first book, In Patagonia. Chatwin himself was different things to different people: a journalist, a photographer, an art collector, a restless traveller and a best-selling author; he was also a married man, an active homosexual, a socialite who loved to mix with the rich and famous, and a single-minded loner who explored the limits of extreme solitude.
From unrestricted access to Chatwin's private notebooks, diaries and letters, Nicholas Shakespeare has compiled the definitive biography of one of the most charismatic and elusive literary figures of our time.
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.
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). It is the international span of Chatwin's experiences that makes 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 and the detailed passage describing Chatwin's awful, miserable death surrounded by friends and family. There are a plethora of adjectives used to describe Chatwin 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. 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
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- PublisherJonathan Cape Ltd
- Publication date1999
- ISBN 10 0224035770
- ISBN 13 9780224035774
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
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