In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin

This book is one that has often been praised for qualities that I find to be repulsive and immoral. That is not to say that this book was entirely worthless, but it felt like something defiled, something tainted by the egotism and essential dishonesty of the man who wrote the book. To say that the book is tainted by the author’s strident political biases is also true, and it is hard not to see how the bad politics and bad character of they author are hard to disentangle from each other and from this work, which has all the hallmarks of an unreliable “nonfiction novel” of the kind that is predictably praised by the disreputable contemporary media giants like the Wapo and New York Times. This book is formed of the sort of slimy and biased “journalism” that they practice, so of course they like it. And just as predictably, because of the same reasons, I disliked this book. Again, that is not to say that there is nothing of value in this book, but the few jewels of worth in the book feel like nuggets of valuable material that are revealed after one has sifted through a lot of manure.

The essential trouble with this book–and others like it–is that it purports to tell the story of an interesting and somewhat remote place where the author spent time, but what one gets is the author’s perspective in the center of everything without an honest admission of bias and partiality that would allow the reader a fair chance to discount what the author says to its appropriate level. It is little wonder that many of the people that the author interviewed were extremely upset and even felt betrayed about the way that they were portrayed in this slim volume. The author’s stock-in-trade, and that of contemporary journalists in general, is adherence to “the message,” usually some sort of fashionable but immoral and unjust leftwing thinking, as is the case here, combined with an immoral focus on getting a story and breaking it, combined with a willingness to steal from anyone else who came up with a felicitous phrase or idea first and pawning it off as one’s own original thinking. This book is a textbook and somewhat early example of the decadence and corruption of modern journalism, notable at least in part for how the narrative is so well-disguised that many authors may not pick up on the author’s persistent anti-Semitism, may not know that the author was imprisoned (probably justly and for less time than he deserved) by the Chileans during his travels, and have no idea of the nature of the author’s travels and itinerary or how long he spent in various areas that he writes about. The author ends up being the worst mixture of someone deeply secretive about themselves and their motivations while loudly stealing other people’s stories and using them to develop a reputation as being a colorful storyteller of an obscure but compelling part of the world.

In terms of its contents, this book is about two hundred pages long and is divided into 97 relatively short sections that read like fragments, an early precursor to personal blog entries, each of them painted often like an impressionistic sketch of a particular person or interaction. The names of some of these entries–they are too short to be called chapters–appears on the pages of the right of the book, and not underneath the numerals of the entries themselves. The book begins with a laudatory introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare, who appears to have known Chatwin before his untimely (but probably well-earned) demise. The trip that the author made to Patagonia was in the period towards the end of the second Peron period of rule after Juan Peron’s death and just before the takeover of the country by a military junta, and this political context (and the author’s obvious left-wing sympathies) colors the course of this book and how the author talks about the people and politics of Patagonia, including quite a few chapters dedicated to an unclear and muddled discussion of an Anarchist revolt in the area that was (predictably and justly) put down harshly by the government. The author also shows a great interest in Darwin, in the incredible loneliness of Patagonia, in its fossils, as well as in the diverse group of exiles that populates these pages. These exiles include Welsh settlers, someone who falsely claimed to be king of the Mapuche and whose descendants live in exile in Europe, as well as the first peoples of the area themselves. In reading this book, one gets the feeling that the trip must have been exciting, but one wishes for a more reliable narrator.