In Patagonia (1977)

Não é um relato de viagem tradicional, no estilo "Cheguei a x, cidade de belos lagos". Chatwin segue a trilha dos velhos exploradores da Patagônia, de Sundance Kid, de Darwin, dos cientistas que procuravam fósseis de dinossauros (história que ele conhece desde a infância, graças à pele de brontossauro [sic] da casa de sua avó), dos imigrantes galeses, do Reino da Patagônia, dos relatos dos descobridores da Tierra del Fuego.
Suas trilhas de grande caminhantes formam um painel que se transforma em uma história informal da Patagônia e de seus povos. ( )

Bruce Chatwin leaves work and travels to Patagonia, seemingly unplanned, a place he has always wanted to visit. His travel diary is not a diary in the regular sense, more broken pieces and fragments of text from his experiences in Patagonia with inserts of history, commentary, and cultural reflections.

And here is the main problem. Bruce stands outside the whole travel experience. He reports like a objective journalist, not a person present in the moment. And he even fails at being objective, because many times you can clearly feel the aversion he has to the people he meets. It is not a boring book, and the text is excellently written, beautiful in fact, but it is not a good book. You don't get a feel for the place, and it is too fragmented.

The detachedness of Bruce Chatwin is disturbing. I can't remember any of the persons he describes in such detail, no stories, no places, no names or characters. No recollection. There is no focus at all. How can that be? It was like nothing as memorable. I know that this is considered one of the best travel books ever written, but I will have to disagree, strongly. So I gave up, 10-20 pages from the end.

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For my taste, Chatwin’s musings while traveling through Patagonia is a bit random, and too bogged down in him re-telling what he had read about, either as it related to Butch Cassidy and his cohorts fleeing to Patagonia, or historical tales of revolution from the 19th century to sea travel from the 16th. Sometimes it’s of interest, other times, not so much, and I would have liked more on his own travels through this beautiful country. As it is, the book reveals little about Chatwin himself and has no deep insights into life.

Chatwin’s journey to the end of the world does turn up a number of odds and ends of humanity. Patagonia and Argentina in general are shown to be a bit like America in the 19th century: full of natural rugged beauty, taking an influx of European immigrants who were looking for a better life and who brought bits of their culture, and then who promptly wiped out the native peoples through violence and disease. There are some shocking tales in the book, including sailors from hundreds of years ago clubbing twenty thousand penguins to death on Penguin Island, though happily in that case the penguins have their revenge in the form of a worm they carried, which ate clothes, bedding, human flesh, and the side of the ship.

I have no idea why the NY Times said this was “A little masterpiece of travel, history, and adventure.” Surely there must be better books to travel with.

Quotes:
On death, this one from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
“The many men so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand, thousand slimy things
Lived on and so did I.”

On man’s inhumanity to man:
“Darwin quite liked Jemmy Button, but the wild Fuegians appalled him. … Instead he lapsed into that common feeling of naturalists: to marvel at the intricate perfection of other creatures and recoil from the squalor of man. Darwin thought the Fuegians ‘the most abject and miserable creatures’ he anywhere beheld. … He sneered at their canoe; he sneered at their language (‘scarcely deserves to be called articulate’) and confessed he could hardly make himself believe they were ‘fellow creatures and inhabitants of the same world’.”

And what’s shocking is the language of these people was so poetic; a dictionary compiled by Thomas Bridges unfortunately “survived the Indians to become their monument”, and is referenced and added to my internal “fuck you Charles Darwin”:
“What shall we think of a people who defined ‘monotony’ as ‘an absence of male friends?’ Or, for ‘depression’, used the word that described the vulnerable phase in a crab’s seasonal cycle, when it has sloughed off its old shell and waits for another to grow? Or who derived ‘lazy’ from the Jackass Penguin? Or ‘adulterous’ from the hobby, a small hawk that flits here and there, hovering motionless over its next victim?
Here are just a few of their synonyms:
Sleet – Fish scales
A shoal of sprats – Slimy mucus
A tangle of trees that have fallen blocking the path forward – A hiccough
Fuel – Something burned – Cancer
Mussels out of season – shriveled skin – Old age”

Lastly, I liked this one on mate, the drink favored by Argentinians:
“One man presided over the ritual. He filled the hot brown gourds and the green liquid frothed to the neck. The men fondled the gourds and sucked at the bitter drink, talking about mate the way other men talked about women.” ( )

Not what I expected, but still interesting.I have been trying to get a hold of this book cheaply for years. It's not exactly easy to come by at a discount. I had been hoping for a book that would immerse me in the beauty of the Patagonian landscape. That's not at all what this one does. Chatwin does spend a bit of time on the landscape and natural history, but I certainly didn't get a querencia for the place as I had hoped. It was however a fascinating survey of the varied history of Patagonia. For example, did you even know that Butch Cassidy fled there? It was a refuge for expatriats from all over the world for a couple of centuries. If you got in trouble and got caught, you got sent to Australia, but if you might be in trouble and wanted to run away? You probably went to Patagonia. It was a little bit disappointing in that way too because Chatwin focused primarily on these various expatriats and their stories. There wasn't really much about the 'locals.'

All of that being said, it was still pretty interesting and was worth the read. The journal style writing made it a good one to read in small chunks. I'm glad I read it, but it wasn't what I expected. ( )

Il libro si apre con un ricordo di infanzia, un’ottima introduzione che spiega i motivi che hanno spinto l’autore a recarsi in un luogo sperduto in capo al mondo. Stupisce subito per la freschezza del linguaggio e uno humor inglese davvero diabolico.
Bisogna premettere comunque che Chatwin non è intenzionato a descrivere il suo viaggio, ma piuttosto l’oggetto del viaggio. Se cercate il classico racconto di viaggio dove l’autore descrivere solo azioni e sensazioni, “In Patagonia” non fa per voi.
Il racconto di viaggio di Chatwin non si esaurisce nella mera descrizione. L’autore comprende bene che un luogo è fatto dalle persone che lo abitano. Sono le storie dei patagoni quindi, che si intrecciano al racconto. Il libro è per metà il racconto del viaggio tout court, per metà un compendio di aneddoti che uno dopo l’altro costituiscono la storia informale della Patagonia, il suo humus culturale cui non si può prescidendere per comprendere un popolo e quindi il suo territorio. Nella pagine di Chatwin emergono figure di grandi avventurieri da Darwin a Butch Cassidy e Sundance Kid. La Patagonia quindi è la frontiera estrema, l’ultimo west e pertanto il simbolo stesso del viaggio.
Il carattere di luogo selvaggio non è reso nella descrizione dei luoghi (seppur non manchino stupende quanto lapidarie descrizioni di paesaggio), ma piuttosto nelle vite di coloro che hanno intrecciato la loro storia con questa terra, nel passato e nel presente. Quando non è l’aneddoto storico ad espletare questa funzione, sono i ritratti di quotidianetà che Chatwin ci offre. ( )