In Patagonia Read Online Free

hunting of Indians etc. Everything I need.”
    There is no better precis of the manuscript which he delivered to his agent in August 1976. In his four months there he had discovered Patagonia as a subject and himself as a writer.
    Â 
    â€œThe book is extraordinary, and like nothing else—a law unto itself,” his agent wrote in a cover note to Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape. Maschler had no inkling that this was anything other than the nomad book. “And then I read this thing.” He describes the experience as “one of the ten most exciting events” in his publishing career: “to read this book which I have commissioned which bears no relation to what I had commissioned.”
    In England, the book sold 6,000 copies and won instant praise, Graham Greene writing to say that In Patagonia was “one of my favourite travel books.” But its publication in America one month after winning the Hawthornden Prize eclipsed even Maschler’s expectations. Chatwin’s editor at Summit Press, Jim Silberman, had bought American rights for $5,000 after reading Paul Theroux’s enthusiastic review in The Times . “It had been offered and no one had bought it. I went to a sales meeting and afterwards the head of the parent company came up and said: ‘You know there’s one book on your list that’s not going to sell.’ I said, ‘I know which book and you’re wrong.’”
    One after another the critics stood up.
    â€œReviews from U.S. to burn the eyes out,” Chatwin wrote to Elizabeth. “Doesn’t mean to say they won’t come up with a stinker, but mentioned in the same breath as Gulliver’s Travels , Out of Africa, Eothen, Monasteries of the Levant , Kipling’s Letters of Travel etc. People lose all sense of proportion.” There was even a Rolling Stone cartoon showing the author wandering about Patagonia with a cup of tea in his hand and a bowler hat. “The one that did go really to my heart was a Robert Taylor ( Boston Globe ): ‘It celebrates the recovery of something inspiring memory, as if Proust could in fact taste his madeleine’—ENFIN somebody’s got the point.”
    Few showed greater enthusiasm than the French writer, and Patagonian Consul in France, Jean Raspail. He wrote “in a state of emotion” after finishing the book, bringing news of one more award. “The Patagonian consulate which represents in France the government of HM Orélie Antoine I, King of Patagonia and Araucania in 1863, has decided to award you the first great prize of Patagonian literature.”
    Chatwin’s first book is a literary equivalent of his grandmother’s cabinet, its 93 chapters a catalog for a collection of stories gathered with a singular eye. For all his insistence that he followed a traditional form, most readers disagreed. Among booksellers it inaugurated a new category: “the new nonfiction.”
    Its influences are nevertheless easy to discern. Another provisional title, “Journey to Patagonia,” acknowledges the importance of Osip Mandelstam (“one of my gods”) whose elliptical Journey to Armenia Chatwin had read aloud to a startled Sunday Times art department.
    On April 14, 1979, Mandelstam’s translator, Clarence Brown, wrote to ask “with a certain trepidation” whether Chatwin was aware “that the spirit of OM seems to peep out from behind this or that phrase or stroke of portraiture or landscape.” Chatwin replied by return: “Of course Journey to Armenia was the biggest single ingredient—more so even than met the eye. Perhaps too much so—‘skull-white cabbages etc’ ... But one bit of plagiarism was quite unintentional (though indicative of the degree to which I had steeped myself in the Journey ). Not until after I had passed the final proofs did I realise I had lifted ‘the accordion of his forehead’ straight. I rang