Very interesting looking film on BBC2 this evening where Werner Herzog follows in the footsteps of his friend, the late Bruce Chatwin, travelling to South America, Australia and Wales.
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I thought this was excellent, with the usual eccentricity of Herzog's direction. (The first word of the film's title is Nomad, btw: it's on BBC catchup.) Particualrly interesting if you've read In Patagonia. -
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... we were immensely irritated by this.
I think Chatwin is one of those writers who you have to read at a particular age to be swept up and enthralled - Tolkien works if you read him as a teenager, Chatwin and Lawrence Durrell in your late teens / early twenties. Come to them too late and all their purple prose shoddiness is too painful.
Mme v had read Chatwin when young, her sister also a fan and had travelled in Patagonia. (I've never read him at all.) This summer Mme v and I were staying in the Mani near his final resting place, and made a pilgrimage to the isolated Greek Orthodox church where his ashes were scattered, a beautiful and moving spot. We were looking forward to this hour and a half of telly...
Lordy, this self-indulgent over-lengthy Herzog / Chatwin ego-trip - no.
I suppose it depends if you have any time or sympathy for the woo-woo of ley-lines and similar : I have never had, and mme v no longer has...
Some lovely photography, of course. It has totally put me off from any inclination I might have had to open any of his books...
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I was going to say when this thread opened that Chatwin and Herzog are two of the most annoyingly self-congratulatory individuals I've come across, and the idea of experiencing them together was too much to contemplate...Originally posted by vinteuil View PostComment
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I read 'On the Black Hill' ('Now a Sensational Film') when I was considerably older than a teenager. I have no memory of it whatsoever. As it is a novel, perhaps I should try it again to see if it has some literary merit with little of the aforementioned ego.Comment
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DO re-read. Memorable as much of Chatwin's oeuvre.Comment
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In what some might see as a sign of the continuing commodification of Bruce Chatwin’s legacy, fashion house Burberry have launched a range of Chatwin inspired travel bags. Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s design chief, acknowledged the influence of Chatwin on his work last year at the launch of his menswear collection. He told the Evening Standard: “I found an old first edition book by Bruce Chatwin and became drawn in to his nomadic lifestyle. All the colours in the collection came from book covers and the more relaxed, easy spirit came from Chatwin himself and the nomadic spirit inside him.”
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I wonder if travel writing started to change about 50 years ago, from being primarily about places to being more about the person doing the travelling? I devoured travel writing when young - an example at random, Peter Fleming's Travels in Tartary - at a time when little or nothing was known about the places these writers travelled to. As late as the 1960s, Wilfred Thesiger's The Marsh Arabs, another favourite, shows a gritty lack of solipsism. Many since have been entertaining and observational - Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron - but as there is less and less to say about the places that people don't already know, the writing seems to have become more and more about the writer, the expeditions increasingly contrived. The two genres are brought into stark contrast in Eric Newby's Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, where the pair of effete English twits run into Thesiger.....
Discuss.
I read Utz, and tried In Patagonia, but find Chatwin unreadable for all the above reasons.
The reference section at Tarleton Towers no longer includes the Good Book, I'm ashamed to say, so had to resort to Google.Comment
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I never read Chatwin because I found his ‘fans’ so annoying.
Jonathan Raben is the only travel writer I’ve ever read anything by.Comment
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