Dashing, prodigiously talented, with a mysterious knack for alighting upon alluring geographical and literary destinations, Bruce Chatwin passed through the crowded city of travel writing with a spectral, Keats-like splendor; he even died before his time, but left behind at least two masterpieces, In Patagonia and The Songlines. The latter is a travel book of a peculiar, and peculiarly rewarding, kind: Its landscape is the vast, and largely uninhabited, stretch of Central Australia, yet its landmarks are outcroppings of ideas—presented in pages labeled “From the Notebooks”—that reach from Bedouin proverbs to Baudelaire, Herodotus to Heidegger, all centering on the question of human restlessness.
Lovely writing, well researched, and just a thoroughly enjoyable & fascinating introduction to another culture that is as much about all of us as it is about them
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