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melanie_reads's review
3.0
A solid 3.5 stars and only for those who love reading other people's letters.
This isn’t the first and it certainly won’t be the last time I opine the virtues of letter writing. What is going to happen to the public intellectual when there are no more letters? How will we know the public and private thoughts of writers and travelers? Is anyone saving my emails? Is anyone even reading my emails? All the time people used to dedicate to correspondence has been lost to endless scrolling of the inter webs, interspersed with Facebook posts and Tweets written to no one in particular.
Throw a travel bug into the mix and you have some letters I can really get into. I also miss the art of conversation and meeting people in new and exciting places. Celebs, royalty, the local gentry, etc.
Probably one of the most delightful parts of this collection of letters are the footnotes supplied by Bruce Chatwin’s wife, Elizabeth. Nothing like a little after he’s dead snark to brighten my day.
Of course what doesn’t work about this collection is the elephant in the room. Bruce Chatwin was one of the first public figures in the UK to die of AIDS. I have so many questions about the secrets he kept and what Elizabeth did and did not know about Bruce’s love life.
Bruce seems of a completely different era and although we were alive at the same time for more than a decade, he's of a dying breed of travel writer seeking to find his way in the world. Not doing it for the gram, but doing it for the torture of pouring his soul into books. Maybe the world hasn't changed that much after all.
This isn’t the first and it certainly won’t be the last time I opine the virtues of letter writing. What is going to happen to the public intellectual when there are no more letters? How will we know the public and private thoughts of writers and travelers? Is anyone saving my emails? Is anyone even reading my emails? All the time people used to dedicate to correspondence has been lost to endless scrolling of the inter webs, interspersed with Facebook posts and Tweets written to no one in particular.
Throw a travel bug into the mix and you have some letters I can really get into. I also miss the art of conversation and meeting people in new and exciting places. Celebs, royalty, the local gentry, etc.
Probably one of the most delightful parts of this collection of letters are the footnotes supplied by Bruce Chatwin’s wife, Elizabeth. Nothing like a little after he’s dead snark to brighten my day.
Of course what doesn’t work about this collection is the elephant in the room. Bruce Chatwin was one of the first public figures in the UK to die of AIDS. I have so many questions about the secrets he kept and what Elizabeth did and did not know about Bruce’s love life.
Bruce seems of a completely different era and although we were alive at the same time for more than a decade, he's of a dying breed of travel writer seeking to find his way in the world. Not doing it for the gram, but doing it for the torture of pouring his soul into books. Maybe the world hasn't changed that much after all.
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