The Songlines

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Summary: collage as writing/ if you're a writer you must read this.
Review: Songlines is both gutsy and beautiful. The narrative is compelling and just as you get used to the easy flow of Chatwin's prose he switches gears. The collage of quotes, aphorisms, non-sequitors that make up the middle of the book seems to mimic or mirror the pointellist style of Aboriginal paintings of the Songlines and Dreamtime. Chatwin PAINTS a book much in the same way he describes Aborigines walking the Songlines of the Dreamtime, from point to point walking out the story.

Amazing!

If you're a writer, then you must read this book. It expands the limits of what one thinks a novel can or should be.

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Summary: For those with Wanderlust
Review: The first half of Songlines is an emotionally engaging narrative of Chatwin's adventure. His characterizations of other people are brilliant, the writing delightful, visual, laconic, and powerful. Then something happens; he surrenders the narrative; the book becomes a a collection of not uninteresting impressions, notes, ideas. But these were a let down for me after the start, the story that was touching me, giving such pleasure; it was rather as if he became scared of what a great book he was onto

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Summary: Interesting Meditation on Wandering
Review: The late Bruce Chatwin is regarded as a travel writer, a correct but limited view of his work. This is probably his best book and is only nomimally a travel book. The Songlines describes Chatwin's efforts to understand the central feature of Aboriginal life is Australia. It combines conventional travel narrative with Chatwin's reflections on wandering, nomadism, human nature, and a selection of relevant conversations and paragraphs gleaned from years of reading and traveling. The Songlines examines the clash between hunter-gatherers and industrial civilization, the possible evolution of humans as natural wanderers, and implicitly, the roots of Chatwin's own wanderlust. Chatwin does not announce his ideas but shows them in a series of subtle vignettes; apt quotations, revealing episodes in his travels, thumbnail sketches of conceptions of human evolution. Some of his ideas seem prescient, his suggestion that gathering roots and tubers may have been more important to human evolution than hunting is now being pursued vigorously by anthropologists. Other ideas, such as the crucial role of climate change in Africa at key points of human evolution were popular ideas some years ago and are now controversial. In any case, this is an original, stimulating, and very well written book.

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Summary: Bruce Chatwin should not have mixed such extreme styles.
Review: The Song lines starts out as quite a nice book, you get involved in the characters and the place but then all of a sudden he comes in with pages and pages of endless quotes, almost as if to show off his knowledge of the world. I found this book boring and too segmented, if he wanted to write an interesting narrative about central Australia he should have done so, and if he wanted to write a strictly factual book about the nomadic existance but mixing theses two up simply creates a detached and boring novel.

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Summary: Chatwins Masterpiece
Review: The Songlines is the best book that Bruce Chatwin ever wrote. Out of all his books none came as close as this to explaining his world-view.
By examining the cultural significance of songs for the Australian Aboriginals Chatwin reveals his postmodern perspective, rejecting modern mankinds materialistic enslavement to possessions and urbanity-cum-insanity. Instead he favours a freer earthbound philosophy of living, a return to nature and to natural laws, and a more spiritual search for meaning in an essentially meaningless universe.
Profound, extraordinary and richly evocative of Australia, this book contains some of Chatwins finest writing. It is about the evolution and origins of mankind and it is also a book about death. The Songlines was written by a man thinking about death.
If you want to understand what Bruce Chatwins on about read The Songlines.

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Summary: could of been
Review: The Songlines is unfortunately two books in one and they do not really gel. Each separately would of received more stars. It starts quite well as a narrative of his time in Alice Springs and the aboriginal culture he explored. This is very readable and quite educational (and would of scored 4 -5 stars). Unfortunely at about halfway through books he starts putting in little quotes in sequence often for 20 - 30 pages which interupts the story line of the other 'book'. He really should of pulled the quotes out and built them into a second novel. In the end though the book became a struggle to read because it no longer flowed

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Summary: A Cultural Renaissance
Review: The Songlines starts off as seemingly boring...Chatwin's narrative style is monolithic and virtually empty. However, as the book progresses, we learn of the Aboriginal culture, from Chatwin's point of view anyway. For anyone who has the remotest interest in Antropology, this book could be of interest. While Chatwin's analysis of the Aboriginals isn't nescessarily strictly accurate, it is the closest many of us will get and provides a compelling read. The book is somewhat biographical; most of the events described in the novel-like narrative of the book are, at least, based on truth. This makes it more astounding, because it's just not a figment of the author's imagination.

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Summary: Myths
Review: There are many myths about the Australian Aborigines and most of them are misguided. As a white Australian I don't profess to any special understanding of the Aboriginal, but I do know that it is wrong to try to measure their success or failure in terms of European cultural traditions. It matters little that Michael Long, Gavin Wanganeen, Dean Rioli, and Che Cockatoo-Collins are wonderful Australian Rules footballers, that there are spectacular painters now using mediums foreign to their culture, that there are successful politicians, or Olympic athletes. What matters is that Aborigines are honoured for what they are, for their own culture. As a music lover I have struggled to come to grips with one of the most sophisticated musical cultures in the world - classical Indian music (Asian Indian, that is). I feel that I need to make the same effort with the Aboriginal culture but it is difficlt since it has been dominated so much by Europeans. What exactly is the Aboriginal culture - one of the oldest isolated cultures in the world? We should not fall into the trap of asssuming it to be a homogeneous culture across such a vast empty space, and one that lived in harmony with nature - always complimenting and never changing the environment. A great place to start is Josephine Flood's 'Archaeology of the Dreamtime'

Chatwin's 'Songlines' is colourful and worth reading but to me it was also disappointing. If it is your step into further exploration on the culture of the ancient race of the Australian Aborigines then read it by all means. My voyage of discovery with the Aborigines was triggered by finding a skull being excavated by wind on the dunes at the back of a lonely beach, but that's another story .....

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Summary: A very human book.
Review: This book by Bruce Chatwin is a rare pleasure, written by a man truly interested in all the peoples of the world including their culture, language, arts and metaphysics. This time Chatwin went to Australia to attempt to understand the very complex system of Aboriginal religious structures called songlines. As far as I can see from this book songlines are the connections in song of one part of the country to another part, each practised by the people who live there with neighbours sharing the "song". Not only does this define their religion but it in fact recreates their land as well, a kind of pure ideality in the philosophcal sense.

The first parts of this book concentrate on Chatwin's experiences with the people of outback Australia be they Aboriginal or white. He seems to find truly remarkable people, each unique and even wild in their own way. Typical of Australia, it is full of people from all the world, such as his friend Arkady of Russian extraction. Chatwin has a fascinating background with his experiences of other cultures often allowing him access to other more conservative people who are suspicious of the outsider. Using this technique he breaks down their resistence and writes with compassion and depth of his experiences. Unfortunately two aspects come to light which I believe are not advantageous to the reading of the book. The first is his tendency to both promote and justify the practise of travelling or the nomadic lifestyle which he himself practises. The second is the habit of filling out the rest of the book with too many quotations from others rather than making use of his experiences with their beauty and uniqueness due to the meeting of people as he travels and the sense of the land which formed the backbone and pure joy of the earlier parts of the book.

Nonetheless an exceptional book and a joy to read. A very human book.

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Summary: Anthropological "pensees" leave you wanting more story
Review: This book starts out with a kind of nice, floating narrative about a meandering trip through Australia's outback. You get a candid look at Aborigines and their land rights movement in a way that's not at all preachy but rather funny. Unfortunately, just as I was starting to care about where the characters were going and what would happen to them, Chatwin treats us to page after page of "pensees," his own and others', on the subjects of nomadism and other topics in cultural and physical anthropology. I was an anthropology major, so I enjoyed many of his ideas, but found some of his main premises to be preposterous... For example, pastoral peoples are notoriously anything but pastoral, being extremely xenophobic and violent as a rule. Chatwin seems to be trying to convince us that the Aboriginals are peaceful and sweet because they roam around a lot... well, maybe. But I don't know that I needed fifteen pages of one-paragraph "thoughts" to state the point. Honestly, I couldn't help skipping pages to get back to the narrative. I understand where Chatwin was coming from with his "pensees" format, but Pascal he is not. Still, if you want a little food for thought, you might enjoy it. If you're looking for a narrative, forget it. Unlike the aborigines, whose travels have purpose and wonderful stories, Chatwin's narrative just kind of ambles around in the dust.