Songlines (Chatwin) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
A blend of travelogue, memoir, history, philosophy, science, meditation, and commonplace book...Chatwin's astonishing style captures the metamorphoses of his own "'Walkabout".... He takes the travel genre beyond exoticism and the simple picturesque into the metaphysical.
Boston Globe


No ordinary book ever issues from Bruce Chatwin. Each bears the imprint of a dazzingly original mind.
Newsday


The riches of The Songlines are varied and artfully stashed. Chatwin's physical journey over Australia's parched hide corresponds to his intellectual excursions, which are full of surprising turns.
Time


In his new book, Chatwin (In Patagonia, etc.) explores the area around Alice Springs, in central Australia, where he ponders the source and meaning of nomadism, the origins of human violence and the emergence of mankind amid arid conditions. Searching for "Songlines" the invisible pathways along which aboriginal Australians travel to perform their central cultural activities, Chatwin is accompanied by Arkady Volchok, a native Australian and tireless bushwalker who is helping the aboriginals protect their sacred sites through the provisions of the Land Rights Act. Chatwin's description of his adventures in the bush forms the most entertaining part of the book, but he also includes long quotations from other writers, anthropologists, biologists, even poets. These secondary materials provide a resonant backdrop for the author's reflections on the distinctions between settled people and wanderers, between human aggression and pacifism.
Publishers Weekly


For Australian aborigines, "songlines" are the string of sites of significant cultural events, such as marriage, song, trades, dances, a hunt, etc., in an individual's and group's history. They are the invisible means by which a man indicates and keeps track of his territory. British author Chatwin (In Patagonia) organizes his book around the Australian aboriginal's notion of songlines, although the writing is more often than not on the periphery of this theme. Interspersed with the explanation of songlines are a narrative of a mild adventure, sometimes with novelistic dialogue, and jottings from Chatwin's notebooks (making up a considerable portion of the book), which include his own musings and observations, proverbs, and quotes from famous people, most of which concern travel and wandering and theory about instinct, myth, etc. A curious work. —Roger W. Fromm, Bloomsburg Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib.
Library Journal