chatwin review, la perdida

Finished up Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia the other day after writing a bit about the author here a bit earlier. Not that it needs my endorsement, but it’s really quite excellent.
(I’m sure “‘Excellent!’ –Joshua Benton, crabwalk.com” will be appearing on the back cover of the next paperback edition.)
It was a slower read than I’d expected. Not because of the writing, which was compelling in a muscular, Hemingway sort of way. Mostly because it has nothing resembling a traditional narrative pull. It’s 200 pages divided into 97 — well, I hesitate to call them “chapters,” since some are barely a handful of paragraphs, but chapters I suppose they are. The longest stretch only four or five pages.
This may sound strange, but in places it really felt like a blog. Lots of short entries, experiences boiled down to the salt, arranged in chronological order. The biggest difference is that Chatwin’s removed himself as a character, something most of us bloggers can’t bear to do. After the first couple of chapters, he pops up only in occasional snippets of dialogue; you never hear what he’s feeling or experiencing. The only thing you hear from that authorial voice is a cataloging of where Bruce went today. It rightly puts the emphasis on the people he meets, and it makes his descriptions more abstractly powerful — but it also makes you wonder a bit more about what he’s making up.
The self-excision is a curious choice, since Chatwin’s the only consistent character in the book. Everyone else flits in for a page or two, says something colorful, then exits stage right. Anyone you meet on page 46 is certain to be long gone from your mental cast of characters by page 82. I suppose he wanted to make the book more about the place — and its flora and human fauna — more than about characters. That’s really what distinguishes In Patagonia from its many successors in the travel-writing world — the trend since the 1980s has been toward centering a journey tale around a much stronger authorial presence. (As with the Redmond O’Hanlon book I wrote about here recently, where you can smell the writer’s sweaty socks in every paragraph.)
Anyway, the real delight of Chatwin is his way with the descriptive paragraph. He may well be the master of the form. Since he’s shuttling in someone new every page or two, he never has much time to develop anyone. He’s basically got a couple sentences to summarize someone and communicate their essential qualities before they can become participants in whatever action he needs them in. And damn, does he do it well.
I just rummaged through the book, flipping to random pages — here are a few examples:
“He was a big man in a striped suit and double-breasted waistcoat. Seals and keys jingled on his fat gold chain. His hair was engominado, like a tango dancer’s, gleaming wings of jet-black hair, but the white was showing at the roots and he looked sick and shaky. He had been a great womanizer and his wife had just got him back.” (p. 92)
“Milton Evans was the principal resident of Trevelin and son of its founder. He was a round mustachioed gentleman of sixty-one, who prided himself on his English. His favourite expression was ‘Gimme another horse piss!’ And his daughter, who did not speak English, would bring a beer and he’d say, ‘Aaah! Horse piss!’ and drain the bottle.” (p. 34)
“Paco Ruiz was eighteen. He was a pretty boy with strong white teeth and candid brown eyes. His beard and beret helped him cultivate the Che Guevara look. He had the beginning of a beer stomach and did not like walking.” (p. 79)
“Swirling along with the crowd was Simon Radowitzsky, a red-haired boy from Kiev. He was small but brawny from working in railway yards. He had the beginnings of a moustache and his ears were big. Over his skin hung the pallor of the ghetto — ‘unpleasantly white,’ the police dossier said. A square jutting chin and low forehead spoke of limited intelligence and boundless convictions.” (p. 122)
“He was a thin nervous boy with a drained face and eyes that watered in the wind.” (p. 25)
“His wife had been stone deaf since her car collided with a train. She had not learned to lip-read and you had to scribble questions on a pad. He was her second husband and they had been married twenty years. She liked the refinements of English life. She liked using a silver toast-rack. She liked nice linen and fresh chintzes and polished brass. She did not like Patagonia. She hated the winter and missed having flowers.” (p. 67)
And my personal favorite:
“In the spring of 1859 the lawyer Orelie-Antoine de Tounens closed his grey-shuttered office in the Rue Hieras in Perigueux, looked back at the byzantine profile of the cathedral, and left for England, clutching the valise that held the 25,000 francs he had withdrawn from his family’s joint account, thus accelerating their ruin.
“He was the eighth son of peasant farmers who lived in a collapsing gentilhommiere at the hamlet of La Cheze near the hamlet of Las Fount. He was thirty-three (the age when geniuses die), a bachelor and a freemason, who, with a bit of cheating, had traced his descent from a Gallo-Roman senator and added a ‘de’ to his name. He had moonstruck eyes and flowing black hair and bear. He dressed as a dandy, held himself excessively erect and acted with the unreasoning courage of the visionary.” (p. 16-17)
Don’t you feel you know Paco Ruiz and Milton Evans and Orelie-Antoine de Tounens, or at least can picture them in your mind’s eye? If you learned that de Tounens later carpetbagged his way to South America and declared himself His Royal Highness Orelie-Antoine I of Araucania and Patagonia, would you be surprised?
Writers might take note of the technique in Nos. 1, 3, and 6 — saving the plainest language and most direct phrases for a concluding detail (“his wife had just got him back,” “did not like walking,” “missed having flowers”) that hits like a punch.
One other reading note: I’m not a big comics person — certainly not opposed, just can never seem to find the time to keep up with the scene past Clowes, Ware, Crumb, and the other biggies.. But before coming to Mexico, I picked up the first four parts of La Perdida, a comic serial by Jessica Abel.
It’s all about a young Chicago woman who, trying to “find herself,” moves to Mexico City. She struggles with a host of identity issues: Is it okay to hang out with your gringo ex-pat friends, or is that cheating? Is a devotion to (insert chest-thump here) “keeping it real” sensible or stupid, and to what extent is “living like a Mexican” something to be sought after? What are rich people’s obligations when they interact or try to understand/value poor people’s cultures? Where is the boundary between appreciation and condescension?
This could all be boring, masturbatory stuff, but to her credit, Abel doesn’t get too dogmatic. Or, more accurately, when it seems like she is, she gets dogmatic in the opposite direction to keep things interesting. In all, it’s quite well executed. Part 5 — which I believe is the thrilling conclusion to our tale — was just released a few days ago. (It’s been coming out at a breakneck one-issue-per-year pace.)