Under the Sun Read Online Free Page A

experience, usually slightly extreme. Travelled – geographically, intellectually, aesthetically and, apparently, sexually. These strange confused feelings when a friend, or even an acquaintance, dies at a faraway distance.’
    If Bail recollected Chatwin’s lack of humour as a chief characteristic, for Patrick Leigh Fermor, writing from Greece, his child-like humour was the quality he cherished: ‘though very mature in experience, discernment and learning and enormously travelled and worldly wise, he had the utterly convincing aura of an infant prodigy shot up like a beanstalk into a sort of open-air Radiguet. Everything – the striking looks, the fluency and verve of his talk, the extraordinary adventures, the urgency, the enjoyment and humour, the nearly fiendish laughter that ended some of his sentences – increased the impression of youth and made his vast conversational range seem more surprising still.’ What Leigh Fermor missed most about his ‘amazingly gifted and suddenly absent companion’ was ‘the energy, the originality and the laughter’.
    To Salman Rushdie, Chatwin was one of the two funniest people he had known. ‘He was so colossally funny, you’d be on the floor with pain.’
    Trying to corner Chatwin’s elusive quality, the novelist Shirley Hazzard cast him as an illuminator, shedding light rather in the way of a lightning-struck bush dragged back to the Swartkrans cave. She wrote to me when I was struggling to bring shape to his life: ‘What is difficult to convey is how much he gave, above all by the enchantment of his presence and his crystal renderings of what had seemed ordinary things.’
    Not one of those Chatwin worked with at Sotheby’s predicted that he would throw up a lucrative partnership to become a student archaeologist, still less a writer. ‘No one would have thought this belated youth capable of writing anything more than his own name,’ believed Von Rezzori in Anecdotage. If the character Chatwin presented in the flesh was an ever-altering scrum – ‘I think I hardly knew him, there were so many of him,’ says his sister-in-law – so also his books, each of them set in a different continent, resisted categorisation. Few understood his enterprise and significance better than a German author whose only experience of meeting him was on the page. W. G. Sebald was foremost of those writers set free by Chatwin. In the last essay that Sebald published before his own untimely death, he touched on Chatwin’s achievement in trampling down the fence-posts imposed by publishers, booksellers and critics. Taught by his example not to be tamed by conventional boundaries, Sebald went on to suggest that Chatwin‘s invigorating legacy lay in pointing a way forward as well as back:
    â€˜Just as Chatwin himself ultimately remains an enigma, one never knows how to classify his books. All that is obvious is that their structure and intentions place them in no known genre. Inspired by a kind of avidity for the undiscovered, they move along a line where the points of demarcation are those strange manifestations and objects of which one cannot say whether they are real, or whether they are among the phantasms generated in our minds from time immemorial. Anthropological and mythological studies in the tradition of Lévy-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques , adventure stories looking back to our early childhood reading, collections of facts, dream books, regional novels, examples of lush exoticism, puritanical penance, sweeping baroque vision, self-denial and personal confession – they are all these things together. It probably does them most justice to see their promiscuity, which breaks the mould of the modernist concept, as a late flowering of those traveller’s tales, going back to Marco Polo, where reality is constantly entering the realm of the metaphysical and miraculous, and the way through the