In Patagonia

After having the kind of experience in Patagonia, which left me without words, I decided to read about Bruce Chatwin’s time there, for which he had 199 pages worth of things to say. Within the first few chapters, I believe I had to refer to Wikipedia nearly twenty times to look up the various historical and literary allusions Chatwin inserts as frequently as commas. Though my reading was moving at a glacial pace, I did think I was learning a great deal. And perhaps I’m just slow, but it took me at least 50 pages to realize that Chatwin was not merely presenting a flowery description of the same place I went to—interspersed with unusual and narrowly related facts—but that his novel was an almost too seamless mixture of fact and fiction.

book cover: In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

It was right about the time that I started to read a detailed account of the personal lives of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, that I began to wonder…but in the end it didn’t really matter. Once I broke the silly habit of trying to match everything Chatwin wrote with some secondary source on the Internet, it was thoroughly enjoyable to pour over the multitude of rich descriptions that resonated with my memories of Patagonia. It became almost a secondary level of excitement to try and figure out which of the ambiguously plausible descriptions were true. Like this one for example:

“The fleet entered the Magellan Strait with the southern winter already begun. A sailor’s frostbitten nose fell off when he blew it…” (87) Could that happen, I thought to myself, maybe so?

I can’t say that my experience in Patagonia was much like Chatwin’s—aside from similar observations of the physical landscape. The only foreigners I saw were travelers like myself, rather than the exiled Europeans, and miscellaneous eccentrics that Chatwin may or may not have come across. But for some reason Chatwin’s illustration of Patagonian people struck a chord with something in the recesses of my memory. There was something familiar in his landscapes filled with sheep herders, asados, quiet and nearly uninhabited pueblos. Something that reminded me of the hostel keeper, waiter, or tour guide, who lived in those places even after we left, whose accordion-like “forehead whined a story of immobility and repressed ambition.” (84)

In Patagonia is a great read, even if you haven’t visited to the southern region. Chatwin’s imaginative journey in search of the origins of a mysterious piece of animal skin (alleged by his mother to be from a dinosaur) is whimsical, rich, and extremely clever in the way that it weaves back and forth between personal account, historical fact, and fiction, using common locations in Patagonia as the links between the tales.