Traumpfade (SZ-Bibliothek, #37)

Traumpfade (SZ-Bibliothek, #37)

4.01 of 5 stars 4.01  ·  rating details  ·  3,653 ratings  ·  257 reviews
The late Bruce Chatwin carved out a literary career as unique as any writer's in this century: his books included In Patagonia, a fabulist travel narrative, The Viceroy of Ouidah, a mock-historical tale of a Brazilian slave-trader in 19th century Africa, and The Songlines, his beautiful, elegiac, comic account of following the invisible pathways traced by the Australian ab...more
Hardcover, 393 pages
Published November 30th 2004 by Süddeutsche Zeitung Bibliothek (first published 1987)
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Trevor
This is a book that is a personal response to whatever it is for white people to think about nomadic peoples with layers of meanings. It seemed to me to be a very honest book - the person telling the story does not try to make himself seem better than he is.

I had never heard of songlines before reading this book - the fact that I've lived in Australia for most of my life and did not know this perhaps says as much about me and as much about the life of a white person in Australia as it does about...more
Robyn
The Songlines is, on the surface, an auto-biographical travel narrative. Under the surface, it's none of these things and so much more. The door in is that the "Bruce" of the book may or may not be the Bruce who is writing. The narrative Bruce's clumsy attempts to interrogate the Australian aboringine's sacred knowledge smacks of neo-colonialistic cultural tourism. Is the real Bruce Chatwin really this gormless or is he positioning his narrative Bruce to point out the problems of such a quest? T...more
Lisa (Harmonybites)
Feb 26, 2013 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it 2 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommended to Lisa (Harmonybites) by: The Ultimate Reading List - Travel
There was plenty in this book that irritated me, and at times, yes things that fascinated me. Indeed, this book is saved from a one star rating for the simple reason that I found what was conveyed about Australian Aborigine culture and their “Songlines” fascinating. When Chatwin kept to his personal observations of the people of the Outback, whether of European extraction or Aboriginal, I was riveted. I have to admit this book did what the best books do--inspire me to read more on the subject--b...more
Jeanette
The wandering words of a wandering writer.

The "songlines" were a sort of Aboriginal GPS. The people could find their way unerringly across vast territories simply by "singing" the ancient stories of the Dreamtime creatures. The stories contained landmarks, and were meant to be sung at a walking pace of about 4 mph. Thus, as he walked and sang, the singer encountered the sacred sites and knew he was following the correct "line" to his destination. As I came to understand the concept, I was moved...more
Beth
Aug 14, 2008 Beth rated it 2 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition Recommends it for: suckers
Recommended to Beth by: a travel class
As I wandered through some special place no one else ever gets to see, I passed a beautiful woman wearing a sheer top that revealed her round breasts and small, pert nipples. She looked seductively at me and licked her lips. I nodded politely, making my way toward a tall man standing by himself.

"Wait!" My super-elite companion stopped me. "That man is the KING OF THE UNIVERSE. He hates everyone! Nothing impresses him. The last white man who attempted to talk to him -- WELL! The King sliced him...more
Ian
I recently re-read Chatwin's book, which takes on a special resonance for me given that I have spent twenty or so years working on Indigenous issues in Canada and, for the past two years, in Australia.

I have always admired Chatwin's erudition and observational skills, and his prose is at times luminous.
I was mightily impressed by The Songlines when I read it a couple of decades ago.

This time around, while in some ways it remains revelatory, it also seemed slightly mean-spirited and aloof. There...more
Echo
Quando guardo una Moleskine mi chiedo come un libricino, apparentemente insignificante, possa esercitare una tale malìa. Come possa riuscire a tirare fuori una vena artistica anche dai pezzi di legno. A indurre la gente a disegnare, scrivere, osservare ed elaborare. Come possa, per incanto, rendere brillanti gli ottusi.
“Le vie dei canti” sta alle Moleskine come l'uovo sta alla gallina.
Non si capisce se le Moleskine devono parte del loro fascino al libro di Chatwin o se il libro di Chatwin non s...more
James
Bruce Chatwin's book is ostensibly an examination of the Australian Aboriginal notion of the Songline: a song that relates a series of geographical locations ranging from one coast to another, tied to the (mythical) creation of an animal, that in a variety of languages unified by tune sings out the geography of the route. He explores this abstract concept through the agency of Arkady and a cast of other Whites who live and work amongst the Aborigines in the harsh heart of Australia, defending th...more
Rick Skwiot

It is what we, Homo sapiens, are made to do: to walk and wander, and to sing of what we see. In "The Songlines" the late Bruce Chatwin posits this and much more, reflecting on the nature of man, on instinct, natural selection, hunting, culture, and why babies cry.

The book, which moved up the bestseller list when it first appeared in this country from Britain in 1987, tells at its core of the Aboriginal dreaming-tracks, the "labyrinths of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia." It r...more
Lyndon Walker
A strange little book. To my mind a sort of English tourist through the immense and complex cultures of the aboriginal people of this country. In some ways recapitulating the colonisation of the indigenous country by the English in the first place; and a kind of misrepresentation of a book: in that it begins as a kind of novella about this young Englishman's tourism through aboriginal culture and then stops halfway through the book and degenerates into a note book of general quotes and esoteric...more
Thomas Isern
Returning to this work after a lapse of years, I rediscovered why I never finished it before. There is, of course, the problem that Chatwin's biographer, Shakespeare, has disclosed the considerable faults of Chatwin as traveler and as narrator. That is an issue for serious readers, but I also share the pique of casual readers who are perplexed when Chatwin begins the document dump from his commonplace books. I don't think I'm perplexed by this, though. Chatwin has written what is, in several way...more
Roberta
“Gli Antenati, che avevano creato il mondo cantandolo, disse, erano stati poeti nel significato originale di poiesis, e cioè «creazione». Nessun aborigeno poteva concepire che il mondo creato fosse in qualche modo imperfetto. La vita religiosa di ognuno di essi aveva un unico scopo: conservare la terra com’era e come doveva essere. L’uomo che andava in walkabout compiva un viaggio rituale: calcava le orme del suo Antenato. Cantava le strofe dell’Antenato senza cambiare una parola né una nota – e...more
Christoph Rehage

Author: Bruce Chatwin
Title: The Songlines
Time: 1986
Destination:
Australia
Length: probably a couple of months
Type: some walking, but mostly by car
Rating: 6/10
A bit on the whacky side

This is a rather interesting one: British writer BC roams through the Australian outbacks in order to find out about Aboriginal songs and their use as cultural “maps” for the nomadic people. He drifts all over the place, befriends the locals and conducts interviews here and there, talks to immigrants, activists, cops,...more
Rebecca
I am a horrible reader sometimes. I read to just read, not because I like what I am reading, which at this point in my life defeats the purpose of it all. I am getting better at putting down boring books, mainly cause I use the library and I don't have to feel guilty about not finishing them because I didn't invest any money in the first place. But school kind of killed that for me and I hate not reading something that I started, no matter how boring it is. Two books I picked up from the library...more
Kerfe
Chatwin journeys to Australia to study aboriginal songlines, the ancestor trails that criss-cross the continent. This is a continuation of his fascination with the nomad, and he brings his notes for an unwritten book on human migrations. These notes, and ruminations that spiral out from them, are interspersed with the Australian story.

Chatwin feels that man's original and most comfortable state was migratory, and his original language, song, the poetry of sound to accompany the journey. His evid...more
Martin Lesser
The book claims to be an account of incidents in the author's life as he travels about Australia and spends time with the aboriginal population. Whether exactly true or not it is a fascinating account, both of the author's experiences with interesting characters and the interesting technique used by the native population to find their way about the country using a kind of song. The "song" represents what is really a technology developed by the native peoples. One suspects (this type of speculati...more
Catherine
I'm not sure what I make of this. The travelogue is is interesting, and his short pen-portraits of some of the characters he meets are remarkably concise and revealing at the same time - like a good cartoon - but I got annoyed by the reams of material from the notebooks. They were like all the ideas and evidence for a thesis which he'd begun to put into order but never quite got round to articulating clearly - almost as if he wasn't quite prepared to stand up for it, wouldn't be willing to under...more
Maria
The Songlines does not have a definite plot one can pin down. It's interpersed with notes from Chatwin's moleskines. The notes and the information about the songlines and Aboriginal culture were the most fascinating bits of this book.

Otherwise, the journey, the people he met… not so much. But Chatwin's descriptions are interesting, colorful, and enough to keep my interest until the next bout of information about the songs or the next notebook section.

The information about the songs is fascinatin...more
Mmars
Sometimes conjuring up the memory of an exotic locale in past reading is all that is needed for me to want to click away at five stars. Songlines is one of those books. I read this shortly after it was published and was thoroughly fascinated. I think to thoroughly appreciate this book one needs to have spent time in nature, unattached to civilization. No devices, no GPS, no phone, no map. No nothing. The only option one would have would be to tune into their surroundings and in effect that is wh...more
Rukmini
'Put it this way,' he said. 'Anywhere in the bush you can point to some feature of the landscape and ask the Aboriginal with you, "What's the story there?" or "Who's that?" The chances are he'll answer "Kangaroo" or "Budgerigar" or "Jew Lizard", depending on which Ancestor walked that way.'
'And the distance between two such sites can be measured as a stretch of song?'


'Songlines' is about Aboriginal culture and Chatwin's experiences travelling through Australia. The book is beautifully written an...more
Jan-Maat
I read this and was utterly impressed by it when I was a teenager. I went on to read a pile of other books written by Chatwin. At some stage, probably after Chatwin's death, I heard that parts of "In Patagonia" had been either invented or substantially misrepresented. Naturally this puts a seed in your thinking and I doubt that "Songlines" should be thought of as a travel book, or as being autobiographical or factual in any conventional or normal sense.

"Songlines" is an exploration of Chatwin's...more
Dave Comerford
Chatwin, an English man of letters and the road, goes to the Australian desert to learn about Songlines. Each aboriginal is born into a song which is at once a tribal affiliation and a map that charts the physical territory. I didn't learn much more about the Songlines than that. Instead, I got a diary of an Englishman's travels in rural Australia and his musings on where the Songlines fit into a universal conception of human nature.
I didn't always enjoy reading this book. Much of what Chatwin...more
Phillip
To ask what it would mean to speculate into the birth of human culture and life, ultimately lead Chatwin toward a kind of travelogue as anthropology. Switching between a recounting of events and a citing of textual excerpts, the book settles into an accumulation of a type of cultural collective unconscious as the only manner in which we could seem to indirectly relate to the cosmological and biological conditions of the emergence of human culture from contingency. It is the relationship which Ch...more
Norah
I am so enjoying this book as I see Australia, starting at Sydney, then Newcastle, then later on to Uluru and Alice Springs. As I read on he is really philosophising about the concept of restlessness, and the need we have to travel and see other parts of the world, so it is good for reading here on my trip. I asked about the author in the Japanese Bookshop I visited in Sydney, and although they did not have a copy, one of the girls at the till had read it and enjoyed it, especially his style of...more
Russell George
I absolutely loved this for the first 200 pages. Chatwin, a sort of literary ethnologist, aims to understand Aboriginal song lines. In Aboriginal mythology, song lines mark the journeys taken by the first animals – the first kangaroo, the first hyena, the first cat etc. – upon their creation. The song lines essentially map the whole continent. When aboriginal people go ‘walkabout’, they are retracing these journeys, essentially a pilgrimage to the land that sustains them.
Chatwin is escorted by...more
Lydia
This book was really interesting and I learned a lot I had never heard of before. The information is fascinating, and the writing style is relatively accessible. I had never heard of flip-flops called thongs before and he never bothers to translate any Australian slang even though he is British! The bit of the book where he is in town and sees a sign on a pub that says "No Thongs" really threw me! I also had to look up willywilly, a type of cyclone, apparently the term is used by Australian mete...more
Mark
I searched high and low for this book and finally found it in a bookstore in Melbourne last month. You'd think it would be easier to find in Australia. Chatwin is right up there with Theroux and Thubron in my book as far as travel writers go, and there are so few books to remember him by.

The Songlines is Chatwin's search for the ancestral mythology of Aboriginal Australia. Songlines are maplines across Australia that carry the story of the original animal in tribal song across the country. That...more
Bob
Feb 17, 2012 Bob rated it 3 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommended to Bob by: docent at Kluge-Ruhe
An odd but enjoyable book which I picked up after a trip to the Kluge-Ruhe museum of aboriginal art hoping to learn more about cultural context of their pieces. On the surface, it's a simple narrative of Chatwin's visit to central Australia in the 1980's to learn about the songlines, but quickly turns into a series of meditations on human aggression, the Hobbes-Rousseau debate on actual conditions in a "state of nature," the origins of language and naming, and the prejudices of settled society...more
Lemar
Chatwin invests everything in this moving account of his research into the Songlines of Australia. Any relevant experience or research that might add to his examination of man's inclination towards a life of migration versus the sedentary life if carefully included. Going back to Cain and Abel, myths and archeology point out that ever since man first pursued a sedentary life and created the villages and monuments we prize in museums, there has continued to exist the nomadic people who just may b...more
Lazarus P Badpenny Esq
“I had the presentiment that the ‘travelling’ phase of my life might be passing. I felt, before the malaise of settlement crept over me, that I should reopen the notebooks. I should set down on paper a resume of the ideas, quotations and encounters which had amused and obsessed me; and which I hoped would shed light on what is, for me, the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness.”

Chatwin pursues his quest for an understanding of the nomadic instinct to the Australian outback and...more
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The Songlines (Paperback)
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Charles Bruce Chatwin was an English novelist and travel writer. He died of AIDS.
More about Bruce Chatwin...
In Patagonia On The Black Hill UTZ What Am I Doing Here? The Viceroy of Ouidah (Vintage Classics)

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“As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.

There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.

The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'.”
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“A journey is a fragment of Hell.” 7 people liked it
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