The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, 1st Ed Cape 1987 HBDJ • Fine, like new condition

Description: The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, 1st Ed Cape 1987 HBDJ • Fine, like new condition. IN HIS NEW book, which far surpasses even his award-winning In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin has used a form common enough in the eighteenth century, rare in ours; the novel of ideas. Although set among the Aboriginal camps of Central Australia, the book nevertheless asks and tries to answer the question of questions: why is man the most restless and dissatisfied animal on earth? What is the source of this restlessness? Could it be, he asks, that we came into being because we were a species which had to migrate with the seasons- and perhaps still should do? Why do wandering peoples conceive of the world as perfect whereas sedentary ones are forever trying to change it? Do we agree with Pascal: that all man's troubles stem from a single cause, his inability to sit quietly in a room? 'Songlines' or 'Dreaming-tracks' are what Europeans call the labyrinth of invisible pathways that meander all over Australia. To Aboriginals, they are the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'. These trails are both intricate sources of personal identity and territorial markers. From such ancient lines Bruce Chatwin has been able to trace a great deal about an Aboriginal culture as complex as it is different from our own. The conflict between the two ways of life mirrors that within 'civilised' man himself. Disputes over the right to excavate (for mining or construction) land that is sacred to wandering tribes highlight the importance of myth and instinct in the human psyche. Money from big business can corrupt tribal loyalties which have endured since time immemorial. Few other places on earth reflect so dramatically the clash between material and mental well-being. What might in other hands seem theatrically picaresque, Bruce Chatwin transforms into something approaching the scale of Greek tragedy, through the medium of anecdotes gathered not just from the bizarre characters he finds inhabiting one of the most uninhabitable parts of the globe but from all over the world. Arkady is his guide and friend on his travels. Although Australian by birth, he is the son of a wayward Cossack exile who reveals the strength, humour and warmth of his inheritance. Whether hunting kangaroo by Land Cruiser or talking to the diminutive Rolf in his book-crammed caravan, their encounters lend an uncanny reality to this profound journey into the geography of the mind. In 1968 Bruce Chatwin began a study of nomads, travelling widely from Afghanistan to Mauritania. From 1972 to 1975 he was a journalist for the Sunday Times. His extraordinary book In Patagonia won the Hawthornden Prize and the E. M. Forster Award. His other books are The Viceroy of Owidah and On the Black Hill.

Price: 75 AUD

Location: Hunters Hill, NSW

End Time: 2024-12-11T04:11:56.000Z

Shipping Cost: 22.57 AUD