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The stories are cleverly intertwined with recollections of his encounters with key contemporary thinkers and personalities.
This gives him a platform to also reveal his vast erudition and to touch on cultural and philosophical reflections.
He may sometimes verge on a certain intellectual arrogance, but one can only forgive the precise writer and the well-travelled thinker.
My favourite story? His encounter with Andre Malraux. How about yours?
More than Chatwin's other books this one is about personalities. He was a grand walker and a literary nomad, so region and landscape play a quintessential role throughout. But the travelogue is backdrop. Each of the book's 35 vignettes reveals an exchange between Chatwin and a personality he connected with. Some of them are famous - Andre Malraux, Werner Herzog, Diana Vreeland - while others, more obscure, get an affectionate introduction:
"Howard Hodgkin is an English painter whose brilliantly colored and basically autobiographical pictures, done both with bravura and with anxiety, fall into none of the accepted categories of modern art."
Or: "Madeleine Vionnet is an alert and mischevious old lady of ninety-six with eighty-six years of practical experience in the art of dressmaking."
Or again: "Maria Reiche is a tall, almost skeletal, German mathematician and geographer who has spent about half her seventy-two years in the Peruvian desert surveying the archaeological monument known as the 'Nazca lines'."
In the end, the only common thread in "What Am I Doing Here?" is Chatwin himself, observing, interviewing, questioning. The writing varies from mundane to transcendent, with occasional slugs of the driest humor this side of a martini. While the overall tone of the conversations is warm and respectful, Chatwin could also be savagely contemptuous. Some of the stories are very dark. Others illuminate. Two essays, titled "Andre Malraux" and "Ernst Junger: An Aesthete at War," integrate complex stretches of 20th-century European history under the umbrella of personality.
Throughout, Chatwin has a flair for revealing big ideas through plain dialogue and casual encounters. "What Am I Doing Here?" never explicitly tackles its eponymous question. Instead, by chronicling the relationships that mattered to him, Chatwin shares a piece of the living investigation that was clearly his passion. I recommend this book (as well as the author's "In Patagonia" and "The Songlines") to everyone interested in the human condition.
When Bruce Chatwin died in '88, there is no doubt that he fulfilled that same goal. His life was undeniably fascinating, and this book is snippets of it. 35 stories, each concerning different people or places, and all of them are riveting.
Chatwin covered an incredible amount of ground throughout his life, and the book gives one a minor snapshot of some of those places. It feels like someone were interviewing him about his life, and just asked the broad question: So, what were your favorite experiences?
I lacked the necessary background in art history to fully appreciate a lot of his stories (he being an art connoisseur), but even with little to no knowledge of such things, Chatwin's book was fascinating; he makes you care about what he cares about, whether you did before or not.
When I finished the book, I put it down and immediately wanted another one just like it. Undoubtedly Chatwin had more stories to tell, but the general public will have to be satisfied with his own self-selected highlights from a fascinating life.
I really can't recommend this book highly enough, especially for people who like to travel, or particularly like art or history.
This compendium, arguably more than any of his other travel books and novels, gives a good insight into the complex and fascinating life Chatwin lived, always in pursuit of the bizzare, the exotic, the beautiful and a good story. Chatwin's writings cover themes as dispirate as travel, art, politics, people and literature. Always discussed in a terse, erudite style that became his trademark. The breadth and depth of Chatwin's knowledge is incredible, thus these writings are not the most accessible. Some appreciation of art history, literature and anthropology for example is necessary to comprehend some of the more esoteric pieces in the collection.
Readers who give Chatwin the time will be able to unravel a wealth of brilliantly illuminated stories. From personal tales about family members, meetings with fabulously well connected and artistic people - such as George Costakis the Soviet art collector and Madeline Vionnet the French dressmaker, descriptions of his travels to far flung places - Patagonia, Afghanistan, China, searching for yeti in the Himalayas - the list goes on, one never fails to marvel at the rich tapestry that comprised Chatwin's life. Certainly, he lived a life about as far from the mundane as it is possible to get.
How did Chatwin manage to constantly encounter such fascinating and varied people and draw out their stories? Part of the reason lies in his connections from his days working as Sotheby's, another explanation lies in his innate charm that seduced men and women all over the world. Also it should be remembered that Chatwin was frequently liberal with the truth in order to tell a story that fitted with his own remarkable perception of the world and its inhabitants. At times he put the fictional process to work in odd instances - his biographical piece on the artist Howard Hodgkin for instance has been declared innacurate by Hodgkin himself, and this as explained in the bibliographical note was published as a 'portrait of the artist' to accompany the catalogue for the Tate Gallery exhibition 'Howard Hodgkin's Indian Leaves'! How did Chatwin get away with it? The truth will probably never fully out, but I would recommend Nicholas Shakespeare's excellent biography 'Bruce Chatwin' for readers interested in finding out more about Chatwin's life.
As a final note, I agree with the opinion of Salman Rushdie that the four short pieces at the end of the book 'Tales of the Art World', written in the last year of Chatwin's life are among the best he ever wrote. Four final drops of genius that Chatwin left before departing this world.
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