New Ways of Seeing and Storytelling

This is a book about Bruce Chatwin and his writing style. Even more, though, it is a book about how Chatwin came to be the person he was through his narrative style. The two innovative elements of his style are his anthropological approach to writing and his new mode of visual perception: the concepts of liminality and visualisation lie at the core of his texts. Chatwin’s writing not only branded travel literature in the eighties but transcended to other fields of fiction and non-fiction. Furthermore, Chatwin’s particular way of perceiving reality both abroad and at home made him perceive his own reality in a different way; he defined himself through an unconventional kind of subjectivity, thus creating a representation of identity other than the one expected in autobiographical accounts. From Chatwin I have learned that fictions enable us to live. He portrays the world through his own fictions and by doing so, readers perceive that reality is plural. We are urged to look not so much for one single and individual truth but for several and universal. Chatwin’s writing is the voice of a man who looks for the reconciliation of opposites within literature and life.