Under the Sun, the Letters of Bruce Chatwin

I think the first Chatwin book I read was The Vice-Roy of Ouidah, a long time ago; I liked it, but it didn't impress me much. It was In Patagonia that captivated me, and then I read everything by him I found, and liked him more and more. Somehow, there's something about Bruce Chatwin - both his writing and himself - that I felt extremely drawn to; some intrinsic characteristic I felt identified with and spoke to my own inner self. I wouldn't know how to define it, and there's a lot about him totally different from me, and a few qualities I actively dislike, but still there's something about Chatwin... After all, it was not by chance I adopted the word chatwinesque, that I first read in the Susannah Clapp biography of Chatwin, and named my blog What Am I Doing Here, the title of one of his collections of texts.

Maybe it's something about the way he sees the world, his permanent need for escape, his restlessness, his ironic humor, his esthetics, his restrained and elegant writing, his insatiable appetite for all kinds of knowledge, his eclecticism, his capacity to dream about places and cultures that made his observations and writings about them so enlightening and interesting... It was probably a combination of all that.

So, I was curious to read this collection of his letters, and they were indeed interesting to read. A lot of it had been quoted in his biography by Nicholas Shakespeare. Once again I disliked some of his personality traits - the maniac side, the thoughtlessness towards others, the snobbishness - but felt identified with other of his characteristics - his endless curiosity, his lust for life, his sense of humor. Somehow I felt some of the comments by his widow sounded like a late settling of accounts, which seem a little cheap. He may have been far from perfect, and probably he was a terrible person to live with, but he wrote wonderful books like In Patagonia, The Songlines, and lots of great essays like the ones collected in What Am I Doing Here, and that's more than we can say about most of people / writers.

Why wonder? [...] Why do I become restless after a single month in a single place, unbearable after two? (I am, I admit, a bad case.) [...] Wondering may settle some of my natural curiosity and my urge to explore, but then I am tugged back by a longing for home. I have a compulsion to wonder and a compulsion to return - a homing instinct like a migrating bird.