Review: The Songlines

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a delightful book, reminding me how great a travel writer Chatwin was.
I have followed his footsteps in the mountains of Lijiang and the wind-swept ports of Chilean Patagonia. I have filled Moleskine after Moleskine of fragments during the past 20 years, but none like the delicate observations recorded in Songlines.

I started using Moleskine notebooks in 2005 in homage to Chatwin.

In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: 'moleskine', in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l'Áncienne Comédie. The pages were squared and the endpapers held in place with an elastic band. I had numbered them in series. I wrote my name and address on the front page, offering a reward to the finder. To lose a passport was the least of one's worries: to lose a notebook was a catastrophe.
In twenty-odd years of travel, I lost only two. One vanished on an Afghan bus. The other was filched by the Brazilian secret police, who, with a certain clairvoyance, imagined that some lines I had written - about the words of a Baroque Christ - were a description, in code, of their own work on political prisoners.

‘I’d like to order a hundred,' I said to Madame. ‘A hundred will last me a lifetime’

I gave the book five stars.

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