[Martin Rocek]

First, David, thank you for the review!

Second, if no one minds, any mention of Patagonia immediately brings to mind the
astonishing deadpan surreal comedy "Eversmile, New Jersey", which features Daniel
Day Lewis as an itinerant dentist spreading dental hygiene consciousness on his
motorcycle as he drives across Patagonia.

[Christine Whittemore]

Coming in late, David, to say thank you so much for posting your wonderful review. It captures the Chatwin flavour, and the quotes remind me why I love his writing, as so many do.

I liked The Black Hill though I seem to recall it as very melancholy despite the ten magnificent minutes of flight--must re-read. Haven't read Utz and will now. Absolutely loved In Patagonia. Also was seduced by The Songlines and am, as others have said, very interested that Chatwin saw it as a strange kind of novel.

N Shakespeare's bio is excellent and I also like Susannah Clapp's With Chatwin.

Will get the letters and am so glad to know about them!

Wonderful to hear you mention Patrick Leigh Fermor--96, my goodness. Wasn't everyone waiting for another promised or in-progress
book by him? did he ever complete it?

Christine

[Christine Whittemore]

And thanks for posting the link to the review in New Republic as well...though it wouldn't let me read the whole thing as not a subscriber..not sure if the two-week offer is really free, will check.

I love the quote from and connection with W.G. Sebald whom I also adore.

At least Chatwin himself was honest in insisting In Patagonia and Songlines were fiction or fictionalized, his editors should have listened to him, but I guess there was fewer writing then along the fiction/non-fiction boundary?

I think it's fine, and wonderful fun, to play with this boundary as long as the reader is dealt with honestly and told when a book that appears factual is actually not....

Christine

[David Mason]

Just popping it to say thanks, and it seems wonderful to me that such rich rivers of conversation have sprung up from the publication of his letters. They can't be mined for perfect gems the way Keats's letters can, but there are some marvelous statements that didn't get into the reviews.


Quotations from Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin:

“This is my ambition—BOTANIST written on my passport. The sale of works of art is the most unlovable profession in the world.”
-To Cary Welch, 27 July 1964

“I am going to be a serious, and systematic writer.”
-To Elizabeth Chatwin, 21 July 1969

“Why are all one’s friends lunatics?”
-To Elizabeth Chatwin, 15 November 1970

“England is now little England with a vengeance, the world of boutiques and bitchery and little else.”
-To James Ivory, 8 April 1972

“I have dined with a man who knew Butch Cassidy and other members of the Black Jack Gang, I have drunk to the memory of Ludwig of Bavaria with a German whose house and style of life belongs rather to the world of the Brothers Grimm. I have discussed the poetics of Mandelstam with a Ukrainian doctor missing both legs….”
-To Elizabeth Chatwin, 21 January 1975

“Aren’t Victoria Falls a surprise? Nowhere else in the world, perhaps, can we look down on the sublime.”
-To Murray Bail, December 1984