Bruce Chatwin - Hardcover

Shakespeare, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385498292 ISBN 13: 9780385498296

Publisher: Doubleday, 2000

Synopsis

Describes the contradictory life of the author of "In Patagonia" and other travel books, who died of AIDS in 1989, and discusses the effects of his experiences on his writings.

About this title

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.

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

Review:

"Of my contemporaries he had the most erudite and possibly the most brilliant mind" (Salman Rushdie)

"An epic piece of work of immense satisfaction... Awe-inspiring" (The Times)

"Comprehensively researched, elegantly written, perfectly balanced between the life, the books and the ideas" (Independent on Sunday)

"Quite simply, one of the most beautifully written, painstakingly researched and cleverly constructed biographies of this decade... Original, intelligent and observant" (Literary Review)

"A fascinating account of the man behind the myth" (Guardian)

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0385498292
• ISBN 13: 9780385498296
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 618