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In Patagonia (Vintage classics)Rating: - InspiringGave me the travel bug and has resulted in many thousands of pounds spent on treks to great parts of the world, all worth every penny. Definitely the most expensive book I've ever bought, but the most rewarding. Rating:  - sadly lacking in detail and depth - grasshopperIn patagonia rates as one of the most disapointing travel books i have read, i actually preferred the fairly awful in the saddle with darwin for some reason even though its heavily chatwin based. having travelled through most of the areas chatwin traverses i thought he really failed to illuminate the people and patagonia. maybe it was the start of a whole new form of travel writing, but thankfully its progressed and adapted. to be honest a lot of the areas history i had already picked up, but obviously guide books pull from travel writings and vice versa, but it did remove one of the books main appeals. somewhere at the beginning Chatwin vaguely states he was looking for a pice of skin which he then finds to end the book, although often there seems to be a real lack of purpose in the book, a huge ammount is the retelling of stories of a vague relative of chatwins almost verbatim, and most of these are fairly pedestrian, most of the rest of the book deasl incoherently with butch cassidy and the sundance kid, but theres far better works available if this is what your after. The book creates an image of Chatwin (as he sees himself possibly) as a Kung-fu (70s TV show) style character aimlessly walking around a undetailed patagonia mostly in flashback. Rating: - SuperbCertainly the best travel book I have ever read. Chatwin covered the history, mythology and reality of Patagonia and in the process added to it. This book convinced me to travel through Patagonia and I can't think of a higher recommendation. Rating:  - a novel, not a travel bookBookdealers and readers alike seem to struggle to classify In Patagonia. Chatwin creates a quest for a piece of prehistoric skin and disguises it as a traveller's account. Yet the work is no more a travel book than WG Sebald's Rings of Saturn. It is a reflective piece of prose fiction that could be called a novel - after all, we accept novels in many other formats so why not as a travel book? Chatwin returned to this approach for The Songlines - written as a journey with a Russian emigre into the Australian outback but this fiction grew out of a jaunt in a hire car with Salman Rushdie. Rating: - a marvellous bookthis is not merely a book on a geoghraphic travel, but a book about a psycological travel which occurs in the same time the phisycal travel occurs. It is a book on the patagonian idea that lies in Chatwin soul. I wish i could write somethin like this! Marvellous |
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