Title: Bruce Chatwin

Author/Artist: Nicholas Shakespeare

Publisher: Harvill

Media: Book

Reviewer: Irene Kappes

This is a lively and gripping book. It is told through endless quotes from friends, family and acquaintances. If you can really know someone through the eyes of others, if the reactions of others and interactions with them are what gives a person identity, then this book gives as comprehensive a picture of the essence of the person, as any book possibly can. It is remarkable in this achievement.

Chatwin comes across as a petulant, arrogant and selfish upper-middle-class snob, who couldn’t come to terms with his own homosexuality; an obsessive traveller, with a fixation on nomads, a penchant for certain classics and an unfailing eye for works of art and antiquities. The book charts his childhood and public school background, his days at Sotheby’s, his marriage, writing, travelling, illness and death, his aspirations and failures.

Doubt is sewn as to the authenticity of events described in books such as In Patagonia; and what you might have thought was a non-fiction work – Songlines- was, after all, reality masquerading as a novel. The question is raised of having to re-visit and re-assess his books. Or should it just be accepted that Bruce Chatwin was an incredible story-teller? He was also a man of outstanding charm and wit and no matter how much he put upon his friends, these qualities clearly outweighed his numerous faults.

If you’re at all interested in Bruce Chatwin then you need to get this book.