In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin - 1/2

1999

• Category

  Music

[Daniel Allen]

Does anyone know the music that's used so well in this documentary?

[Lillian Blessing]

Such a treat!! Thank you for sharing!!

[itisitsits]

Absolutely wonderful!  Thank you.

[galileomoment]

..with the exception of Burma which I visited several years ago. Possibly the only warm climate country of some antiquity in its culture where I wasn't continually hounded by touts and felt truly at a remove from modernity. It'll change now....

[galileomoment]

Now, though I haven't yet read the biography, I have a much better idea of who he was from other articles I've come across. After watching this, it seems almost an impossible life to have lived, working at Sotheby's, reading incessantly, obscure and classic literature, traveling every continent. Friendships, or acquaintances with so many. I've traveled a fair bit myself now, and had in the eighties too, but it never seems quite enough. Travel isn't the same now really, so little of the genuine..

[galileomoment]

His work seemed to me to be so varied in its subjects, I couldn't work out how he'd done it. Back then it was less easy to get information, and where I lived was at something of a remove from the world. I had to write to publishers in London to get copies of articles he'd written and a bibliography of his work. I still have them somewhere.

[galileomoment]

Sometime in the mid nineties there was an interview with Elizabeth Chatwin on the CBC, but I was called to dinner and missed it. I called them up but they hadn't recorded it so I never did hear it. His On the Black Hill was also my favorite of his. In a way, it seemed to be the one he had stepped back from the most, and yet obviously so full of his personal history. I thought it was the most genuine work of fiction he'd written.

[galileomoment]

Thank you. I read "In Patagonia" nearly 20 years ago, only discovering Chatwin a year or so before he died. I was so disappointed but continued to read his other works. I had only begun to read travel books in the mid eighties after reading Theroux's Mosquito Coast and going on to read his "Great Railway Bazaar," thinking, "Why didn't anyone tell me of this genre?"

[Daniel Allen]

Great documentary by Nicholas Shakespeare, goes with his biography of Chatwin.

[Luke Buckley]

That was truly excellent, thank you for the upload, TheAirportOfLove.