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Bruce Chatwin (2001)

Bruce Chatwin (2001)

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Rating
4.12 of 5 Votes: 3
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ISBN
0385498306 (ISBN13: 9780385498302)
Language
English
Publisher
anchor

About book Bruce Chatwin (2001)

I really enjoyed this incredibly long and detailed book! I know a friend of mine who reads copiously but could not cope with it's huge detail and put it down half way through because she thought Bruce was just too hideous a person. I was entranced though. Bruce Chatwin was indeed a very unique person, very good looking and very interesting but not always very likable and certainly devoid of morals and respect for his extraordinary patient and loving American wife Elizabeth. He was an utterly selfish individual who seems to have thought only about himself and his wants 90% of the time. Yet, I liked him a lot - he was entirely eccentric and I think if he'd had children he would have been a great father if he could have behaved himself. Most people could never get through life like he did! He was very fortunate to find a wife like Elizabeth and her American mother. He is lucky he had the charm he seems to have possessed or he would have ended life a very sad and unloved man!Some of the chapters in this book are intensely fascinating - those about how Sotheby's works and the descriptions of the Hunt Museum in Limerick and the revelations about Derek Hill in Co. Donegal and the goings on of the 'British elite' living in estates in Ireland, also the Brits living elsewhere like in Patagonia. Wow!!The descriptions of Mapplethorples in the UK are outrageous - they will stick chillingly in my mind forever! And the little girl being raped in Africa but Bruce's reaction is rather strange but then I suppose his drug habits probably affected his reactions to situations. He was such a unique character that this biography had to be written and it is wonderfully written. When I finally got to the end (I'm sure it took me about a month to get through it) I turned to page 1 and started reading it all over again! Then I read every book that Bruce wrote and those published after his death by his wife and Shakespeare. A must read book even if only for its insight into the mind of utter selfishness! I don't read a lot of books, but Chatwin fascinates. He is rather like he was born several decades too early. I will never forget this book and feel like starting reading it all over again having written this.

A superb biography of a unique individual. Bruce Chatwin was a superb British travel writer -- though he would contest being called that. He was uncomfortable with his Britishness, and he hated being classified as a travel writer. What distinguished him from travel writers is that he deliberately (and artistically) took liberties with the facts and embroidered them to suit his own views. So if you were to use, say, In Patagonia as a guidebook, you would probably run into some angry individuals who were mightily ticked off at Bruce's lack of respect for the story they told him. And yet, he put many places in Patagonia, such as Gaiman near Trelew, on the map. Of course, many readers still persist in using him as a travel guide -- at their peril.When I travel to Patagonia in November 2011, I will re-read the book -- not for its facts -- but for its essential truths.When Chatwin died of AIDS in the Eighties, I think the world lost a great writer.

Do You like book Bruce Chatwin (2001)?

Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Bruce Chatwin, praised as "one of the most beautifully written, painstakingly researched and cleverly constructed biographies written this decade". I agree about the pain.It is incredibly detailed. Too detailed, if you ask me. But that's not why I stopped reading it half way through. Shakespeare, purely by describing, makes me hate Bruce Chatwin. He portrays Chatwin as a man who pretended to be something he wasn't, who lost himself in a made-up reality. He had the ability to draw people into this reality, to fascinate them, but it seems as if it was all a great lie, as if had they seen him for what he was, they wouldn't have been fascinated. I don't know anything about Chatwin, except his books and his photographies. He could very well have been the man Shakespeare describes him as, but I don't care if he was. And I don't want to know. I'd rather not know him at all. That's why I didn't finish the biography, because I feared that if I did, his books would lose their magic for me. Which, if you think about it, is a great compliment for Shakespeare'ss abilities as a biograpy writer. He made me almost hate the man he writes about, that's how much Chatwin becomes alive in this book. Maybe I'll finish it one day, but I doubt it.
—Oceana2602

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