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.

View all my reviews

Comments

Review: A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins My rating: 3 of 5 stars The book offers an intriguing exploration into an alternate architecture of intelligence, drawing from Hawkin's extensive background in neuroscience and computing (he helped design the Palm Pilot). The book is divided into three parts, each tackling a distinct aspect of brain function and its implications for artificial intelligence and beyond. The book's first part is a compelling dive into the world of cortical columns. It focuses on the importance of the brain's cortex (the crumpled outer layer), which is thought to have evolved later than the older 'reptilian brain', which the author dismisses throughout the book (despite the fact it keeps him and other humans alive). Hawkins suggests that if you spread the brain's 'newer' neocortex out on a table into its 2.5mm thick extra-large pizza size, you would be looking at 150,000 simil...

Review: The Pot of Gold and Other Plays

The Pot of Gold and Other Plays by Plautus My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is the second set of Plautus plays translated by E.F Watling 60 years ago. Not as good as the first The Rope and Other Plays and more ribald. That said, the title play 'The Pot of Gold' is excellent as is 'Pseudolus' . Plautus often breaks the 'fourth wall', not just with the characters giving the prologue, or the cast giving an exhortation for applause (a device used by Shakespeare in Midsummer Nights Dream and The Tempest ), but by characters in the body of the play acknowledging what the audience does or does not already no. There are some clever stage devices: in The Swaggering Soldier , a connecting door allows for a farcical appearance and disappearance of twin sisters (the same person rushing from house to house), a technique that Alan Ayckbourn would likely admire. As with his other plays, the concept of Twins (real and imagined), wily slaves, a...

Review: Selected Poems

Selected Poems by W.B. Yeats My rating: 3 of 5 stars In the introduction to the collection, Timothy Webb writes that ' Yeats maintained that poetry should be a revelation of hidden life' (and not a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold felt). There is certainly a lot of revelation. Yeats wipes the layers of dust off mythology and Irish history and opens a box hidden in plain sight. I started the collection after a journey from Dublin to Belfast, and slowly dipped into its pages over a couple of months. Some of the poems remain a mystery, with references to names and places familiar to the poet, but not to the reader, and others echo history that is painful to many after more than four centuries in Ireland. My absolute favourite is 'Stolen Child' , but the haunting verses were already imprinted on my memory. In 1998, at the university halls of residence (Derwent D Block), Rachel, Neil, James, Ray, and I would cook Sunday lunch in a Baby...

craig robert martin

Search This Blog