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About the Author
Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) was the author of The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, and Utz. His other books are What Am I Doing Here and Anatomy of Restlessness, posthumous anthologies of shorter works, and Far Journeys, a collection of his photographs that also includes selections from his travel notebooks.

Customer Reviews

The Best Travel Book Ever Written
Of all the travel books I've read over the years, this is the one I always come back to. It's an extraordinary work: a brilliant mix of journey, revelation, history, people of another land, another time. I marvel at Chatwin's gift of language, his insights into the ways and means of how the people in this ancient land of South America live, and have lived for centuries. There's a kind of authenticity to the storytelling techniques that Chatwin employs: it makes everything personal, almost private. And as a reader, you're drawn into his world, his engagement with the locals, with their roots and the richness of their history. The book is, quite simply, a masterpiece.

-Tom Maremaa, Author of the Forthcoming Metal Heads: A Novel from Kunati Books in Spring 2009

genius or attention deficit disorder?
Befitting of a genius with an active and wide-ranging mind, Bruce Chatwin has a charm and intensity that might lead you to believe he has attention deficit disorder. Drifting from one narrative thread to the next between chapters (each just a few pages long), he delves deep into the story of each person he meets, and substantiates these stories with literary and/or historical references. Though a few themes recur (e.g., the search for the lost mylodon and the story of Butch Cassidy's escape to Argentina), this is a book that is easy to put down between fragmented sections. And yet, it is still overall an enjoyable work.

Travelers are far more likely to go to Patagonia to avoid people than to learn about them, but Chatwin gracefully pulls of this challenge. Selflessly, he leaves himself out of the story- though Nicholas Shakespeare's introduction notes that Chatwin had a noteable love affair and was arrested in Chile. Unfortunately, Chatwin's narrative is short on dialogue and his description of people is typically terse and short on details, which prevents characters from coming to life. However, Chatwin shows traces of poetic brilliance ("music ghosted from the piano as leaves over a headstone"), an eye for metaphor (noting that in the obscure Yaghan language the word for depression is the same as the word for a crab's vulnerable phase after sloughing off a shell), persistence (evidenced by his uncovering of the origin of the name Patagonia), and bits of dry humor ("The Indian settlements were strung out along the railway line on the principle that a drunk could always get home.").

not what I expected
For a long time, I wanted to get familiar with Bruce Chatwin's work. I managed to get "In Patagonia" as the first of his books I could read.

The beginning was very promising. The narrator (writing in author's voice, in the first person), as a child, finds in his grandmother's dining-room cabinet a strange piece of leather covered with thick, reddish hair. His mother tells him it is a piece of brontosaurus brought by his grandmother's cousin, Charley Milward, from Patagonia. This piece of information fed his young imagination and led him to go and explore the South American wild land on his own.

In many short chapters, written in eloquent prose, Chatwin describes his encounters with Patagonian people, interchanging his quasi-travelogue with historical notes and anecdotes, and the tracing of Charley's footsteps. The impressions and anecdotes are freely mixed and he comes back to subject he abandoned before. This results in a strange read. I could not connect with this book at all and it took some effort to persevere with reading. I liked the historical oddities he found, the story of the self-proclaimed king, Orelie-Antoine, the notes on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and their adventures in South America, or Thomas Bridges and his dictionary of Yaghan. Chatwin's impressions from his journey and his observations did not move me at all.

I have still two more of Chatwin's books, "What I am doing here" and "Songlines" and I intend to read them, but I hope I will like them more than "In Patagonia".