Particularize Books As The Songlines
| Original Title: | The Songlines |
| ISBN: | 0140094296 (ISBN13: 9780140094299) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in South Asia and Europe (1988) |
Bruce Chatwin
Paperback | Pages: 304 pages Rating: 3.98 | 8906 Users | 583 Reviews
Commentary Toward Books The Songlines
In this extraordinary book, Bruce Chatwin has adapted a literary form common until the eighteenth century though rare in ours; a story of ideas in which two companions, traveling and talking together, explore the hopes and dreams that animate both them and the people they encounter. Set in almost uninhabitable regions of Central Australia, The Songlines asks and tries to answer these questions: Why is man the most restless, dissatisfied of animals? Why do wandering people conceive the world as perfect whereas sedentary ones always try to change it? Why have the great teachers—Christ or the Buddha—recommended the Road as the way. to salvation? Do we agree with Pascal that all man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room?We do not often ask these questions today for we commonly assume that living in a house is normal and that the wandering life is aberrant. But for more than twenty years Chatwin has mulled over the possibility that the reverse might be the case.
Pre-colonial Australia was the last landmass on earth peopled not by herdsmen, farmers, or city dwellers, but by hunter-gatherers. Their labyrinths of invisible pathways across the continent are known to us as Songlines or Dreaming Tracks, but to the Aboriginals as the tracks of their ancestors—the Way of the Law. Along these "roads" they travel in order to perform all those activities that are distinctively human—song, dance, marriage, exchange of ideas, and arrangements of territorial boundaries by agreement rather than force.
In Chatwin's search for the Songlines, Arkady is an ideal friend and guide: Australian by birth, the son of a Cossack exile, with all the strength and warmth of his inheritance. Whether hunting kangaroo from a Land Cruiser, talking to the diminutive Rolf in his book-crammed trailer, buying drinks for a bigoted policeman (and would-be writer), cheering as Arkady's true love declares herself (part of The Songlines is a romantic comedy), Chatwin turns this almost implausible picaresque adventure into something approaching the scale of a Greek tragedy.
The life of the Aboriginals stands in vivid contrast, of course, to the prevailing cultures of our time. And The Songlines presents unforgettable details about the kinds of disputes we know all too well from less traumatic confrontations: over sacred lands invaded by railroads, mines, and construction sites, over the laws and rights of a poor people versus a wealthy invasive one. To Chatwin these are but recent, local examples of an eternal basic distinction between settlers and wanderers. His book, devoted to the latter, is a brilliant evocation of this profound optimism: that man is by nature not a bellicose aggressor but a pacific, song-creating, adaptive species whose destiny is to quest for the truth.
Be Specific About Based On Books The Songlines
| Title | : | The Songlines |
| Author | : | Bruce Chatwin |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 304 pages |
| Published | : | June 1st 1988 by Penguin (first published 1987) |
| Categories | : | Travel. Nonfiction. Cultural. Australia. History |
Rating Based On Books The Songlines
Ratings: 3.98 From 8906 Users | 583 ReviewsCrit Based On Books The Songlines
It makes sense that Bruce Chatwin and Werner Herzog were friends. Of course they were. According to Herzog, the two of them met in 1984 in Australias Northern Territory. Chatwin was doing research for the book that would become The Songlines and Herzog was working on his film Where Green Ants Dream. They spent two full days talking to each other. Chatwin on his deathbed supposedly gifted Herzog with the leather rucksack hed used on so many of his travels. Parallels both of style and substanceThis book blew my mind. I never considered geography as song, until I stumbled through the bush recreating the Dreamtime with this chap. You'll never glance an odd shaped rock or peculiar growth again, without conducting a epic myth in song, attempting to explain in language a landscape we are all foreign to but responsible for.
The book is very awesome.
If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Dreaming Tracks: "The Songlines" by Bruce Chatwin(Original Review, 1988-05-15)Ive been reading The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin for the past couple of days, which Im really enjoying at about the halfway point. Its a travel book, I suppose, about Chatwins experiences in the Australian Outback learning of Aboriginal culture and their belief in songlines or dreaming tracks, or to the Aboriginals as Footprints of the Ancestors or the Way of
I had great expectations about this book, it is one of the favorites of my wife and for years it stood temptingly staring at me in our library. But I'm afraid it turned out to be a disappointment. As in "In Patagonia" Chatwin reports about one of his journeys, a meandering quest, not in Fireland this time but in Australia where he went looking for the key to the Aboriginal-culture. This is a quite interesting topic of course, and the information he gives about the Songlines and everything that's
4.5★He knew he was dying and it enraged him. One by one, he had watched the young men go, or go to pieces. Soon there would be no one: either to sing the songs or to give blood for ceremonies.In aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land: since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die.Bruce Chatwin was a highly regarded English writer and traveller with a deep curiosity about nomadic people. He was fascinated by the idea of songlines around the world that tell the story of the
This is a book that is a personal response to whatever it is for white people to think about nomadic peoples with layers of meanings. It seemed to me to be a very honest book - the person telling the story does not try to make himself seem better than he is.I had never heard of songlines before reading this book - the fact that I've lived in Australia for most of my life and did not know this perhaps says as much about me and as much about the life of a white person in Australia as it does about
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