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Loading... Bruce Chatwinby Nicholas Shakespeare
None. 1   thorold | Apr 1, 2011 |  This biography held my attention even though I don't think I wouldn't have liked Chatwin - a strange, fey man whose adventures and eye for antiques and art made what could have been a merely eccentric and self-absorbed life into a fascinating one. (  ) ffortsa | Dec 25, 2009 | A detailed, unflinching record of Chatwin's life and works. Shakespeare makes good use of original material and the memories of those who knew Chatwin, both admirers and detractors. There is a constant tension between the elusive qualities of the subject and the biographer's intention to pin down and explain; how do you write the life of someone who was constantly rewriting his own life as he lived it, and improved on his stories at each repetition? But this tension imparts to the book some of these myth-making characteristics. (  ) catalpa | Oct 31, 2008 | This biography doesn't offer up a cohesive and satisfying narrative as much as it presents a series of impressions. Chatwin is a strange man, and ordering his life from the outside presents an obvious challenge. That said, 'Chatwin' is an honest effort, and is enlightening on some strange level at least, when it comes to a man whose life was carefully crafted and desperately manipulated at almost every turn. ( ) alamosweet | Dec 28, 2006 | Award-winning novelist Nicholas Shakespeare has written the definitive biography of one of the most influential literary figures of our time: Bruce Chatwin, whose works' strangely compelling combination of research, first-hand experience, myth, and mystification may have been the real substance of his seemingly contradictory life. Chatwin's first book, In Patagonia, became an international bestseller, revived the art of travel writing, and inspired a generation to set out in search of adventure. Chatwin became a celebrity, while remaining a conundrum. With little formal education, he had become a director of Sotheby's. An avid collector, he eschewed material things and revered the nomadic life. Married for twenty-three years, he had male lovers throughout the world. And only at his death did his personal myth fail him. Nicholas Shakespeare, who was given unrestricted access to his papers, spent eight years retracing Chatwin's steps and interviewing the people who knew him. The result is a biography that is at once sympathetic and revelatory. 1 antimuzak | May 1, 2006 |
His all but week-by-week account of Chatwin's 49 years, plus exhaustive details about parents, grandparents, great-uncles, etc., searches out and amply documents his childhood, school days, life at Sotheby's, marriage, travels, books and his slow and agonizing death, but it does not provide the configuring that biography aspires to. Shakespeare has made a creditable wager, but despite the many virtues of his effort, he has essentially lost it. How could a biographer succeed with a subject compulsively invisible to himself, and whose intimates assert not even the partial truths from which an image might be assembled?
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0385498306, Paperback)Bruce Chatwin was the golden child of contemporary English letters. Paradoxically, however, his books appeared relatively late in his life: until 1977, when the 37-year-old author published In Patagonia, this precocious, intense figure had occupied himself as an art specialist at Sotheby's, a journalist with the Sunday Times, an archaeologist, and a restless, perennial traveler. Once he got started, of course, Chatwin made up for lost time. By 1989, when he died of an AIDS-related illness, he had produced seven books--including two superb novels and his sui generis masterpiece, The Songlines--and won himself a worldwide audience.As Nicholas Shakespeare makes clear in Bruce Chatwin, his subject remained an obsessive art collector long after he left Sotheby's. He was no less assiduous when it came to the acquisition of human trophies, taking both male and female lovers throughout the course of his marriage. Many a wife might have resented these magpie impulses--and indeed, Elizabeth Chatwin and her errant spouse endured some rocky times. Yet she remained touchingly loyal to him, and it was her cooperation and tenacity that enabled this biography to come about. Shakespeare captures the author's peculiar charisma and his tendency to transform everything--friendships, landscapes, meals, journeys--into aesthetic artifacts. Even when Chatwin experiences a writer's block while working on The Viceroy of Ouidah, he does it with style: To try to finish the book, Bruce rented a house in Ronda for five months: "an exquisite neo-Classical pavilion restored by an Argentinean architect who has run out of money." He wrote in longhand on 20 yellow legal pads, refilling his Mont Blanc from two bottles of Asprey's brown ink.There is excellent, evocative writing throughout Shakespeare's biography. The passages describing Chatwin's miserable death are both harrowing and deeply moving, but Shakespeare is no less adept at conveying, say, his subject's disappointment at failing to win the Booker Prize for Utz. (Chatwin cheered up considerably when a friend told him that Alberto Moravia had given the book a glowing thumbs-up in an Italian newspaper.) What comes across most, perhaps, in this immense and excellent life, is the complete aloneness of the man, an almost impenetrable solitude. Australian poet Les Murray may have had the last word when he noted: "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 (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:37:53 -0500) No library descriptions found. |
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Wikipedia in English (2)
4
Having read this, I'm still not much closer to making my mind up about Chatwin: he was arrogant, parachuted into places for a few weeks and used other people's lives and the results of their work irresponsibly, went in for unscientific theories of everything, and used the label of "fiction" to protect himself against any comebacks. On the other hand, he had a wonderful gift for assimilating abstruse knowledge and presenting it in interesting ways; he wrote and looked like an angel; and by Shakespeare's account he alternately charmed and infuriated a large circle of friends. I suppose you pays your money and you takes your choice.
I've read biographies of both John Betjeman and Bruce Chatwin recently. In both cases it seemed that the really interesting characters, only present on the margins of the story, were the wives. Coincidentally, Penelope Betjeman and Elizabeth Chatwin were close friends who would go off trekking in India together. I must read more about them. (