In Patagonia

Neither novel nor travel book, this classic journey defies category.

Purportedly a quest for a scrap of giant slothskin, which the author finds in a cave in southern Chile, it zig-zags through time and space, alighting on travellers from Magellan to Butch Cassidy, while trampling down conventional boundaries.

“Everyone says: ‘Are you writing a novel?’ No, I’m writing a story and I do rather insist that things must be called stories. That seems to me to be what they are. I don’t quite know the meaning of the word novel.” 

Chatwin is a storyteller and adventurer. He makes his way into Argentina, across the Pampas, and into the mountains at the tip of South America where he finds in a cave remnants of a giant ground sloth that had lived there thousands of years before. His writing takes you on the journey: listening to a pianist on a passenger ship playing on an out-of-tune piano, drinking with local shepherds, telling tales of old conflicts and revolutions. Like all good travel writers, he is precise: “I passed through a desert of black stones and came to Sarmiento. It was another dusty… show more.

I've picked In Patagonia, his first book, but I can honestly recommend anything written by Chatwin. Long after his death in middle age, he remains one of the best in the world for balancing fine writing with a sense of place. We have all read those authors who can't help reveal that they think the places they visit ought to come second to their waxy words. And we've all read books where the journey is truly extraordinary but the writer is not up to the task of sharing it. Chatwin always finds that sweet spot where the writing elevates… show more.

In Patagonia is a full-on adventure tale about the southernmost tip of Argentina. Chatwin’s singular writing talents transform this travelogue into a literary masterpiece. He treks through former hide-outs of famous bandits, including Butch Cassidy, retrieves forgotten legends, and mixes in stories of Welsh immigrants. Published in 1977, In Patagonia is beloved by writers as well as travelers.

I talk about Chatwin in my Aimlessness, and for that book I read everything he had written. Chatwin was one-of-a-kind—a bit like a beatnik in his refusal to live a bourgeois lifestyle, he was also a bit like a classic polymathic, erudite, British intellectual, even though he never finished a university degree. He spent time as a director at Sotheby’s, selling art and antiquities, and as a journalist reporting from far-flung locales. But eventually, he just wandered the globe extolling the values of restlessness, exploration, and the nomadic life. It can be argued that Chatwin invented contemporary travel writing—he… show more.