Word: chatwin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...word travel, Bruce Chatwin reminded an interviewer in a recent issue of the British literary journal Granta, is related to the French travail. "It means hard work, penance and finally a journey," he explained, noting, "There was an idea, particularly in the Middle Ages, that by going on pilgrimage, as Muslim pilgrims do, you were reinstating the original condition of man. The act of walking through a wilderness was thought to bring you back...
...Chatwin, 47, does not claim to be devout, although he appears, as was said of James Joyce, to have rejected religion while preserving its forms. He even seems to have had an antirevelation in which scales did not fall from his eyes but covered them. Twenty years ago, Chatwin, then an art expert with Sotheby's in London, woke one morning and could not see. His sight returned later that day. No organic cause for this temporary blindness could be found. An examining physician concluded that the young connoisseur had been looking too closely at pictures and prescribed distant horizons...
...Chatwin took the advice and hit the road. He traveled to Asia, the Soviet Union, Africa, South America and the U.S. The results were In Patagonia (1977) and The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), two remarkable books that demonstrated enviable gifts for observation, description and narrative invention. The Songlines brings these qualities to high relief, combining the conventions of travel writing, the patterns of the philosophical essay and the strategies of fiction. The work is obviously based on fact and personal experience, although Chatwin declares that much of it is literary concoction. In short, The Songlines is a book whose resistance...
...narrator is a tall, thin ascetic named Bruce Chatwin, a migratory writer fascinated by nomadic peoples and the origins of human nature. His curiosity takes him to Australia, where he has heard that the continent is entwined by songlines, invisible paths that the aboriginals can read like sheet music. According to their creation myths, Australia was literally sung into existence by ancestral creatures. They wandered over the vast land mass during the dreamtime, giving names to animals, plants, hills and depressions. Re- enactments of these legends are the walkabouts, aboriginal cross-country amblings that not only strengthen ties...
FICTION: Bech Is Back, John Updike George Mills, Stanley Elkin Ironweed. William Kennedy ∙ On the Black Hill, Bruce Chatwin ∙ The Painted Lady, Françoise Sagan Shiloh and Other Stories, Bobbie Ann Mason