What Am I Doing Here?

What Am I Doing Here is a collection of journalism and new pieces assembled on Chatwin's deathbed. Reviews, articles, memories. It is hard to find a weak piece or bad sentence. The worst you can say about his carved, icy prose is that it occasionally crosses into archness or effect for its own sake. But you don't have to say that often. Chatwin's review of Ernst Jünger's wartime diaries (see here for my look at 'The Devil's Captain: Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941-1944') is still the best English language introduction to this controversial German writer. Chatwin, firmly on the left, liked the work rather than the man or his politics. Here's his summary of Jünger's 'On the Marble Cliffs': [It] is an allegorical tale, written in a frozen, humourless, yet brilliantly coloured style that owes something to the nineteenth-century Decadents and something to the Scandinavian sagas. The result is a prose equivalent of an art nouveau object in glass. Nicely put. Chatwin wrote three novels himself ('The Viceroy of Ouidah' from 1980, 'On the Black Hill' from 1982, and 1988's 'Utz'), along with 1977 travel book 'In Patagonia', and 'The Songlines' from 1987, a half-fictionalised account of Aboriginal Australian culture. All are worth picking up. 'Utz' is the neatest; 'On the Black Hill' the best; 'The Viceroy of Ouidah' a failed attempt to update Flaubert; 'In Patagonia' the starkest travelbook ever written; and 'The Songlines' alternately excellent and lazy. No-one ever regrets reading Chatwin's crystalline, detached prose. Книга «What Am I Doing Here?» автора Брюс Чатвин оценена посетителями КнигоГид, и её читательский рейтинг составил 0.00 из 10.
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