La nostalgia del espacio

by Bruce Chatwin, Antonio Gnoli, Juan Carlos Gentile Vitale (Translator)

Cuando Bruce Chatwin, el gran viajero, el entusiasta contador de historias, publicó en Italia su genial En la Patagonia, concedió esta excelente y sustanciosa entrevista a Antonio Gnoli, periodista de la Repubblica. En ella descubre aspectos personales sobre su vida, sus pasiones y el significado que para él tienen sus viajes. El resultado de esta caleidoscópica conversación es la visión de un mundo muy peculiar, desconocido para muchos, a través de la mirada de quien reconoce, en cada tierra, la propia.

La nostalgia del espacio es un excepcional documento: un testimonio directo del escritor que personificó el mito del viajero al final del siglo xx. Nadie como Bruce Chatwin ha simbolizado el «nomadismo» y ha influido en diversas generaciones que, desde su muerte, le han convertido en uno de los más célebres escritores de viajes y en un auténtico autor de culto consagrado en el mundo entero.

«Muchas facetas de su carácter, o mejor aún de su estilo, reflejaban la complejidad del personaje. Pero, al mismo tiempo, la sencillez y la naturalidad de sus maneras daban a esa complejidad un timbre único e inconfundible. Todo esto contribuyó a su afirmación, que fue, entre otras cosas, sorprendentemente rápida. Ese éxito ha estado envuelto, desde entonces, por un aura de leyenda.» Antonio Gnoli

91 pages, Hardcover

First published December 7, 2000

About the author

Charles Bruce Chatwin was an English novelist and travel writer. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill (1982).

In 1972, Chatwin interviewed the 93-year-old architect and designer Eileen Gray in her Paris salon, where he noticed a map of the area of South America called Patagonia, which she had painted. "I've always wanted to go there," Bruce told her. "So have I," she replied, "go there for me." Two years later in November 1974, Chatwin flew out to Lima in Peru, and reached Patagonia a month later. When he arrived, he left the newspaper with a telegram: "Have gone to Patagonia." He spent six months in the area, a trip which resulted in the book In Patagonia (1977). This work established his reputation as a travel writer. Later, however, residents in the region contradicted the account of events depicted in Chatwin's book. It was the first time in his career, but not the last, that conversations and characters which Chatwin presented as fact were alleged to have been fictionalised.

Later works included a novel based on the slave trade, The Viceroy of Ouidah, which he researched with extended stays in Benin, West Africa. For The Songlines (1987), a work combining fiction and non-fiction, Chatwin went to Australia. He studied the culture to express how the songs of the Aborigines are a cross between a creation myth, an atlas and an Aboriginal man's personal story. He also related the travelling expressed in The Songlines to his own travels and the long nomadic past of humans. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, his novel On the Black Hill (1982) was set closer to home, in the hill farms of the Welsh Borders. It focuses on the relationship between twin brothers, Lewis and Benjamin, who grow up isolated from the course of twentieth century history. Utz (1988), was a novel about the obsession that leads people to collect. Set in Prague, the novel details the life and death of Kaspar Utz, a man obsessed with his collection of Meissen porcelain.

Chatwin was working on a number of new ideas for future novels at the time of his death from AIDS in 1989, including a transcontinental epic, provisionally titled Lydia Livingstone.