Re: [ejlist] Chatwin & Juenger

[e-ensign <e-ensign@thing.net>]

-- [ From: e-ensign * EMC.Ver #2.5.02 ] --

Gary Kern wrote:
>>
>>e-ensign wrote:
>> 
>> Underneath an excerpt from Nicholas Shakespeare's brandnew >>biography on
Bruce Chatwin.

>
>Very interesting.  Please remind me, who was Bruce Chatwin?

Here's what the dust jacket of the book has to say: 
----------------------------------------------------
BRUCE CHATWIN's death from AIDS in 1989 brought a meteoric career to an
abrupt end. His reputation as a storyteller has grown over the last decade,
and his exquisite, subtle texts continue to inspire readers all over the
world. "Of my contemporaries he had the most erudite and possibly the most
brilliant mind I ever came across," says Salman Rushdie. He was, in the view
of Werner Herzog, the ultimate storyteller: "It's the resonance of the voice
and the depth of his vision that make him one of the truly great writers of
our time." 

Chatwin burst onto the literary scene in 1977 with his first book, In
Patagonia, which changed for a generation the definition of travel writing
and brought a fresh lustre to modern English letters. The uncategorisable
books that followed - The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The
Songlines and Utz - confirmed his status as a major writer able to reinvent
himself constantly. But how much do readers who feel they have travelled
with him to South America, Africa, Wales, Australia and Europe actually know
the real Bruce Chatwin?

He was different things to different people: a director at Sotheby's with an
unerring eye for detail; an archaelogist present at the finding of the
evidence of man's earliest use of fire; a successful Sunday Times journalist
; a photographer; an art collector; a restless traveller and a best-selling
author. Married for 23 years, he was also an active homosexual. A socialite
who loved to mix with the rich and famous, he was a single-minded loner who
explored the limits of extreme solitude. Melancholic and manic, intense and
uproariously funny, he loved most of all to tell stories - about his friends
, about the people he met on his many travels and about himself. 

In 1991, Nicholas Shaekespeare was given unrestricted access to Chatwin's
private notebooks, diaries and letters. Across five continents he has
gathered evidence from Chatwin's peers, his friends, his family, his hosts,
his enemies and his lovers. Looking for Chatwin behind the masks, he has
written the definitive biography of one of the most charismatic and elusive
literary figures of our time.
---------------------------------------------

I'd also like to draw your attention to Chatwin's essay "An Aesthete at War,
" which is both a review of Juenger's WWII diaries and an account of his
visit to Juenger in 1974. Although the essay contains a few minor mistakes 
(of a purely factual nature), it is one of the best pieces ever written on
Juenger. It can be found in the Chatwin anthology "What Am I Doing Here."

Regards,
RBR