"In Patagonia"

[fiefoe]

Can a book be judged by its foreword? Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin's biographer, hooked me early:

• In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are.
• I left his flat taking very seriously the link between a Scots tartan and the red flag of Socialism.
• a poet who said that Chatwin wrote as if he was in exile from a country that didn’t exist.
• Chatwin’s arrest by the Chilean military or his seduction of the young pianist “Anselmo”
• enormous armadillo up to 9-10 feet long, each scale of its armour looking like a Japanese chrysanthemum
• mentioned in the same breath as Gulliver’s Travels, Out of Africa, Eothen, Monasteries of the Levant, Kipling’s Letters of Travel
• Osip Mandelstam (“one of my gods”) whose elliptical Journey to Armenia
• Chatwin had described their difficulties with a twentieth century eye, passing swiftly through their lives and refusing to dwell. He had snatched the intimacy Borges writes of: “That kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow.”
• Generally speaking, he did not subtract from the truth so much as add to it. He told not a half-truth but a truth and a half.

Travel memoir shoul be divided into two categories: one where the author doesn't worry their reader with logistic concerns, and ones who do.

• I pictured blood and ice, flesh and salt, gangs of Indian workmen and lines of barrels along a shore—a work of giants and all to no purpose; the brontosaurus went rotten on its voyage through the tropics
• The guerillas also rented holiday villas, or went to Switzerland to ski.
• On my right was a lady novelist. She said the only subject worth tackling was loneliness.
• Dr Ameghino did not like this zoological version of the Monroe Doctrine.
• Purple swallows were chasing bugs. When they flew above the cliff, the wind caught them and keeled them over in a fluttering reversal and they dropped again low over the river.
• Years later he remembered the trip through the filter of his Notting Hill boarding-house and wrote a book so quiet and sane it makes Thoreau seem a ranter. Hudson devotes a whole chapter of Idle Days in Patagonia
• he concludes that desert wanderers discover in themselves a primaeval calmness (known also to the simplest savage), which is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.
• He was thirty-three (the age when geniuses die)  / the unreasoning courage of the visionary
• And yet his career followed that of other dislocated monarchs; the picaresque attempts to return; the solemn ceremonial in shabby hotels; the bestowal of titles as the price of a meal ticket
• The beach was grey and littered with dead penguins.
• And now the piano would be silent and her tears would water the pasta. Secretly, however, she was pleased about him going.
• Anselmo had a passion for the culture of Europe, the authentic, blinkered passion of the exile.
• ‘Now I play Chopin. Yes?’ and he replaced the bust of Beethoven with one of Chopin.
• I sheltered under the porch and watched his colony of pet toads.
• The rain drummed on the tin roof. For the next two hours he was my Patagonia.
• Bees hummed around the poet’s hives. His apricots were ripening the colour of a pale sun. Clouds of thistledown drifted across the view and in a field there were some fleecy white sheep.
• Apart from these ponchos, their maté equipment and their knives, the peons were free of possessions.
• Persian was dousing himself in the shower. The Persians had come to Patagonia as missionaries for their world religion.
• ‘I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other God.’
• There was an old legend of a city and a new rumour of gold.
• Once you get a drunk gaucho in the saddle, he won’t fall off and his horse will get him home. But this presupposes a dangerous moment while you seat him.
• country of bones picked clean by hawks, stripped by the wind, stripping men to the raw.
• The dead Uncle was the Wild Bunch Gang’s robbery of the First National Bank at Winnemucca, Nevada, on September 10th 1900. The writer was Robert Leroy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy,
• A Dowd horse was ready for sale when its rider could balance a gun between its ears and fire.
• competitive girl called Betty Weaver, who pulled fifteen spectacular bank robberies before her arrest and jail-sentence at Belleplaine, Kansas, in 1932.
• Ostriches bounded off the track as we passed, their feathers billowing like smoke.
• the mother said: ‘Those were the Russian nurses, the ones Churchill and Roosevelt sent back to Stalin. They were packing them into trucks and they knew they were going home to die.
• She still had the tatters of an extraordinary beauty.
• ‘Mad Ludwig?’ ‘The King? Mad? You call the King mad? In my house? No!’
• Curled in the bottom of the cage lay the dried-up skeleton of a thistle.