BRUCE CHATWIN

An ingenious, outsize myth-meets-facts "life and works" of the charismatic global citizen and compulsive tale-teller.

Prizewinning political novelist Shakespeare (The Dancer Upstairs, 1997, etc.) carefully situates Chatwin (1940–88) in each milieu where he sought, then outgrew, mentors: boarding school, Sotheby's, archaeological digs, the London Sunday Times, world capitals' gay subworlds. An active if conflicted bisexual, he mesmerized relatives, friends, colleagues, lovers, and critics, who turn up here to voice every shade of judgment concerning his marathon monologues ("Bruce on form could be the song the sirens sang"—unless "he murdered people with talk"), his "ascetic de luxe" style of writing and living, his overdrive curiosity. (He could have claimed as his credo "I need desperately to know certain things.") The incremental portrait of Elizabeth Chanler proves that finding this resilient, independent, dedicated American was Chatwin's "greatest luck": Whatever his wildest forays, their 23-year marriage remained his ultimate refuge. Shakespeare tracks the restless wanderer as he scavenges the world for experience he encapsulated in dazzling verbal edifices that defy classification. In Patagonia (1978), the most legendary travel book of its time, revived that region of Argentina; The Songlines (1987) appropriated and enlarged upon aboriginal cosmology. A thirst for the marvelous pursued Chatwin to the last. Records confirm he died riddled by a rare South Asian fungus fostered by the AIDS he never admitted to, which elevated him to baroque hallucinations and hypomania before his death at 48. Though impressed by the man's unfettered brilliance, Shakespeare evenhandedly displays every persona constituting "The Chatwin Effect," from solipsistic na‹f to literary wonder-worker, mountebank sponger to golden-haired Prometheus. This spirited tell-all will make newcomers yearn to try his books. An unflinching reconstruction of a singular writer's scorching trajectory through life: Speed makes it concise; fate makes

it haunting.