chatwin
After reading Chatwin's "On the Black Hill" I wanted to know more about the author of this sensitive, old-fashioned novel. Nicholas Shakespeare, himself a novelist, has written an exhaustive, and exhausting, biography of Bruce Chatwin. It is a long one and I had to buy stronger reading glasses because the font was so small. I regret spending so much time reading about a guy who resembles so many others that I know and sometimes wish I didn't. He was selfish, self-indulgent, exploitive and claimed to be an expert on almost everything, although I suspect his knowledge of many things was a mile wide and an inch deep. He married a woman who is surely a masochist and mostly ignored her until he needed her to bathe and change him at the end of his life. That said, I'll probably read more of his works, but not too soon, while trying to forget all I know about the author.