The New York Review of Books

In her memoir about Bruce Chatwin, Susannah Clapp tells the following story. Not long before his death, already very ill, Chatwin was receiving guests in his room at the Ritz in London. Many of them left with a gift. One friend was given a small jagged object which Chatwin identified as a subincision knife, used to slit the urethra in an Aboriginal initiation rite. He had found it in the Australian bush, he said, with his connoisseur’s eye: “It’s obviously made from some sort of desert opal. It’s a wonderful color, almost the color of chartreuse.” Not long after, the director of the Australian National Gallery spotted the object in the grateful recipient’s house. He held it up to the light and muttered: “Hmmm. Amazing what the Abos can do with a bit of an old beer bottle.”

Chatwin had the gift of polishing reality like Aladdin’s lamp to produce stories of deep and alluring mystery. He was a myth-maker, a fabulist who could turn the most banal facts into poetry. To question the veracity of his stories is to miss the point. He was neither a reporter nor a scholar, but a raconteur of the highest order. The beauty of this type of writing lies in the perfect metaphor that appears to illuminate what lies under the factual surface. Another master of the genre was Ryszard KapuKapus�cin�ski#347;ciKapus�cin�ski#324;ski, the Polish literary chronicler of third-world tyrannies and coups. One entire book of his, The Emperor, a poetic rendering of life in the court of Haile Selassie, is often read as a metaphor for Poland under communism—an interpretation always denied by the author himself.

The German film director Werner Herzog was a friend of Chatwin’s as well as KapuKapus�cin�ski#347;ciKapus�cin�ski#324;ski. He made a film—by no means his best—of one of Chatwin’s books, entitled Cobra Verde, Like them, Herzog—modestly of course, as if it’s really of no great consequence—likes to tell tales of his own frightful hardships and narrowly missed catastrophes: filthy African jails, deadly floods in Peru, rampaging bulls in Mexico. In a filmed BBC interview shot in …