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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)

The Songlines

Bruce Chatwin

Paperback | Pages: 304 pages

Rating: 3.98 | 8906 Users | 583 Reviews

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Title	:	The Songlines
Author	:	Bruce Chatwin
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 304 pages
Published	:	June 1st 1988 by Penguin (first published 1987)
Categories	:	Travel. Nonfiction. Cultural. Australia. History

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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.

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Ratings: 3.98 From 8906 Users | 583 Reviews

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The wandering words of a wandering writer. The "songlines" were a sort of Aboriginal GPS. The people could find their way unerringly across vast territories simply by "singing" the ancient stories of the Dreamtime creatures. The stories contained landmarks, and were meant to be sung at a walking pace of about 4 mph. Thus, as he walked and sang, the singer encountered the sacred sites and knew he was following the correct "line" to his destination. As I came to understand the concept, I was moved

I am in love with the structure of this book; initially, it describes a series of encounters with black and white Australians living in the nearly uninhabitable Central Australia. Chatwin's guide on this journey is an Australian of Russian descent, one of the many striking figures we meet - and I must add here that Chatwin was accused of the same sin as Kapuściński, apparently taking too much liberty with the degree of 'literariness' of his reportages.Chatwin quite delicately (at least to my

The book is very awesome.

Written a generation ago, in the 1980's, The Songlines has achieved considerable fame in the world of travel literature. Along with In Patagonia, this is one of Bruce Chatwin's two best-known works. Chatwin was an English travel writer in the mold of the highly educated, multi-lingual amateur, who could write about all manner of things historical, cultural, anthropological, architectural, linguistic and so on, with great eloquence and wit, and a dash of devil-may-care daring thrown in for good

I absolutely loved this for the first 200 pages. Chatwin, a sort of literary ethnologist, aims to understand Aboriginal song lines. In Aboriginal mythology, song lines mark the journeys taken by the first animals the first kangaroo, the first hyena, the first cat etc. upon their creation. The song lines essentially map the whole continent. When aboriginal people go walkabout, they are retracing these journeys, essentially a pilgrimage to the land that sustains them. Chatwin is escorted by

The book is very awesome.

There was plenty in this book that irritated me, and at times, yes things that fascinated me. Indeed, this book is saved from a one star rating for the simple reason that I found what was conveyed about Australian Aborigine culture and their Songlines fascinating. When Chatwin kept to his personal observations of the people of the Outback, whether of European extraction or Aboriginal, I was riveted. I have to admit this book did what the best books do--inspire me to read more on the subject--but