Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

Paperback, 2000

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Genres

Biography & Memoir

Biography

Publication

Vintage (2000), Paperback

Description

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. "From the Trade Paperback edition.""… (more)

Media reviews

NY Times

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?

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User reviews

LibraryThing member thorold

Competent and very readable biography that tries to make sense of a complicated, contradictory character. Written with the co-operation of Chatwin's widow and his parents, so it tells us a lot more about his early days than literary biographies usually manage to do. On the other hand, Shakespeare

clearly feels obliged to present Chatwin's wife as a long-suffering saint: possibly another biographer with more freedom to act could give us a bit more perspective.

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3 more

LibraryThing member gcoupe

I purchased this (remaindered) biography of Bruce Chatwin written by Nicholas Shakespeare. I probably did it to confirm my own prejudices (the sneaking suspicion that Chatwin was 'not a nice man') and on that level it delivered in spades. Shakespeare gives a magnificent warts-and-all portrait.

Chatwin's friends and his apparently long-suffering wife could obviously see beyond the warts - all I saw was a monstrous egotistical carbuncle called Bruce Chatwin. I am pleased to have made his acquaintance via this biography; I would never have wanted to meet him in real life. I would have viewed him as a black hole - always taking, never giving.

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LibraryThing member alamosweet

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.

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LibraryThing member ffortsa

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.

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