List Books Concering 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
Rendition 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.
Point Appertaining To Books The Songlines
| Title | : | The Songlines |
| Author | : | Bruce Chatwin |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 304 pages |
| Published | : | June 1st 1988 by Penguin (first published 1987) |
| Categories | : | Travel. Nonfiction. Cultural. Australia. History |
Rating Appertaining To Books The Songlines
Ratings: 3.98 From 8906 Users | 583 ReviewsAssessment Appertaining To Books The Songlines
The Aborigines' way of navigating, communicating and negotiating by 'Songlines' is absolutely intruiging, and I thank this book for shedding some light on this subject. For example, between chapter 14 and 15 there's a beautiful creation myth. I wish Chatwin had written more text like that. However, most of the book is not about the songlines, but about Chatwin himself, eating and drinking with Australians, most of which have nothing to do with the Aborigines and their plight. Chatwin paints aI searched high and low for this book and finally found it in a bookstore in Melbourne last month. You'd think it would be easier to find in Australia. Chatwin is right up there with Theroux and Thubron in my book as far as travel writers go, and there are so few books to remember him by.The Songlines is Chatwin's search for the ancestral mythology of Aboriginal Australia. Songlines are maplines across Australia that carry the story of the original animal in tribal song across the country. That
I am picky when it comes to travel literature. The curious thing about my pickiness when it comes to travel books is that I don't like to use travel literature as a way of broadening my horizons - I like to read it to narrow my world view and back up what I already know. To clarify, because I suspect I have just made a strange and confusing statement, I only normally read travel literature which deals with places I have already visited because I want a back up opinion from the author. What did
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
I had been wracking my brains for a way to introduce the topic of Australian Explorers to my students that was respectful of Aboriginal history and culture when I suddenly remembered that I had a copy of Bruce Chatwins The Songlines on my TBRThe new Australian Curriculum requires that students learn something about the courageous European explorers who mapped this country and its waters but the topic needs to be studied in the context that of course the indigenous people of this country already
If I was given a choice of 3 people to invite for dinner from any age, Bruce Chatwin would be one. I only wish I could sit down (probably in a pub) and watch him drink a pint and tell stories of his travels. He writes in such a compassionate way about the people he comes across in his travels, he has a way of explaining and understanding histories and events that is so intriging to me. This book is so loved and well worn...I underlined almost the entire copy. It is not only about the aboriginal
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
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