With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer

The celebrated author of such beloved works as In Patagonia and The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin was a heartfelt nomad whose desire for adventure and enlightenment was made wholly evident by his writings. A great storyteller with a superbly original eye, Chatwin had achieved international literary stardom before his death from AIDS in 1989, at the age of forty-eight. In With Chatwin, Susannah Clapp also sheds light on some of the controversies surrounding the author's legend, and presents the lavish and difficult contradictions of his life. As his first editor and one of his literary executors, Clapp was uncommonly close to both Chatwin's life and work. Here, she calls upon Martin Amis, Edmund White, Salman Rushdie, and Chatwin's wife, among others, to re-create the elusive realm in which he lived. The Chatwin that emerges in this portraiture is one whose imagination and passion will be cherished by generations of readers.

With Chatwin is a charming exploration of the life of beloved writer Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin--both high-brow and low-, both collector and nomad--was a man of contradictions. His writing "hovered teasingly between fact and fiction," and he was fascinated by paradoxical subjects: a private art collection in a Communist country; a publicity-loving woman who lives alone in the desert. For Chatwin, being on the road was an obsession. He "was an inventive and adventurous traveller," an itinerant who got writer's block at home and who believed that people are happiest when on the move. "Travel does not merely broaden the mind," he once said. "It makes the mind."