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From the days of Herodotus travel writing has taken us to places
both remarkable and foreign and has often read like the best
literature. The English writer Bruce Chatwin's elegant straightforward prose took
the genre to a new level with his acute observations of the truly
odd. A small fragment of mylodon hide on display in a
cabinet at his
grandparents' house that he had seen as a child sparked his
fascination with Argentina. Years later Chatwin embarked on a
remarkable South American odyssey to Patagonia in search of the
remains of this semi-legendary creature.
In
Patagonia, Chatwin's 1977 account
of this trip, narrates his encounters with the
region's hardscrabble and eccentric inhabitants with humor and
panache. Here the weather is arduous and the vegetation
sparse. One of the last regions in the world to be colonized by
Europeans, Patagonia once occupied a special place in the
imagination of travelers and immigrants alike. Populated by
dangerous outlaws and a ragtag group of fortune seekers and
loners, it functioned as an Argentine Wild West, attracting
cowboys and adventurers from around the world. Chatwin's
Argentina is a land of remarkable diversity: "The history of
Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov,
Emilio Rommel, Crespins D.Z. de Rose. Adislao Radziwil, and
Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random
from among the R's - told a story of exile, disillusion and anxiety
behind lace curtains." The author's voracious cultural
appetite samples everything from local folklore to paleontology,
the theory of evolution, Peronism, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid, and the suppleness of native Fuegan verbal forms. As
Chatwin said of his book: "In Patagonia is not a
travel book in the usual sense but a Quest or Wonder Voyage.
It is about wandering and exile, and its structure is as old as
literature itself: the narrator travels to a remote country in
search of a strange beast, and, as he goes along, describes his
encounters with other people whose stories delay him en
route."
Read:
In
Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin
Travel:
Argentina
www.i-escape.com
Tags:
literature
travel
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