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In Patagonia
Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia follows a journey through the southern regions of Argentina and Chile, but it is neither a practical guide nor a continuous record of an itinerary. Chatwin assembles the book from brief encounters, historical digressions, family legends, archival traces, and sharply observed landscapes. A childhood memory of a mysterious scrap of animal skin—said to come from a prehistoric creature—provides the journey with its initial quest. Along the way, Chatwin investigates Welsh settlement, Indigenous displacement, European migration, labor unrest, vanished outlaws, eccentric colonists, and stories attached to remote houses and settlements. The result is a mosaic in which Patagonia becomes both a geographical region and a repository of exile, longing, violence, and reinvention. First published in 1977, the book became influential for its compressed, episodic approach to travel writing and its deliberate movement between reportage, oral history, literary reconstruction…