SEQUELS TO A Patagonian Journal.

• Author: Buck, Daniel

BRUCE CHATWIN'S LEGENDARY ACCOUNT OF HIS JOURNEY THROUGH THIS REGION STILL INTRIGUES LOCALS AND VOYAGES ALIKE

WHEN HE FIRST LAID' EYES on Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia in 1996, Adrian Gimenez Hutton had been visiting southern Argentina for more than two decades. "I was very impressed with Chatwin's narrative style, with his way of mixing fact and fiction, little personal anecdotes within larger histories," says Gimenez, a Buenos Aires travel writer.

A friend surprised him by saying that the work was completely fictional, implying that Chatwin had never set foot in Patagonia. Gimenez thought that was impossible, that the book must reflect actual experiences. But prompted by his friend's declaration, he decided to go see for himself. On and off over the next couple of years, Gimenez jeeped around Patagonia, tracing Chatwin's footsteps, visiting towns and estancias where he had been, and interviewing the people he had interviewed. Gimenez's narrative--as he put it, "the journal of his journal"--aptly titled La Patagonia de Chatwin, was published in Argentina in 1998.

Chatwin had ventured to this remote zone of Argentina and Chile's southern latitudes because of the skin of a giant sloth, a mylodon, found in a cave on the Last Hope Sound by his grandmother's cousin, Charley Milward, a merchant-ship captain who had settled in Punta Arenas after a shipwreck. Milward had mailed a scrap of the skin back to the family in England, and although it was later lost, Chatwin's sight of it--"black and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair"--in a cabinet in his grandmother's dining room had lodged in his mind. At least, that's how he recounted it in the opening page of his first book. Elsewhere he added that he had gone to Patagonia to free himself from the strictures of life in London and to realize an unfulfilled desire to be a writer. Above all, he wanted to explore not a place but an idea: nomadism.

Born in England in 1940, Chatwin studied architecture and made a stab at acting. At age eighteen he joined Sotheby's auction house in London where he had a meteoric career, rising from porter to director in a few years. He left Sotheby's to study archaeology but soon signed on with the London Sunday Times magazine. Before he died in 1989 at age forty-eight of AIDS, Chatwin had gone on to write three novels and The Songlines (1987), in which he returned to the theme of wandering, recounting his excursion to the real and dream worlds of peripatetic Australian aborigines. (Two collections of his essays and one book of his photographs have been published posthumously.) During his entire life he...