The Best Barnet
Jeremy Harding, 20 February 1997
With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer
by Susannah Clapp.
Cape, 246 pp., £15.99, January 1997,0 224 03258 5 Show More
by Susannah Clapp.
Cape, 246 pp., £15.99, January 1997,
“... Susannah Clapp’s memoir of Bruce Chatwin has little in the way of hard-going and nothing of the comprehensive record that bloats a literary biography. It makes no claims about the relation between a writer’s life and work that weren’t already clear from Chatwin’s career, and tends to confirm that the real waywardness of this ur-traveller lay in his darting and musing and drifting intelligence: the long list of places visited, sights seen, hinterlands crossed can seem like a vulgar indiscretion by comparison – the mind, not the world, was Chatwin’s oyster ... ”