Reviewed by Em Angevaare 
Under the Sun is a record of a life of immense restlessness. The letters of Bruce Chatwin, edited by his wife Elizabeth and his biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, span more than forty years, and in that time the author was rarely in one place for more than a few months. The letters show a man who was always on the move, and whose thoughts outran even his travels, moving quickly and in many directions. He knew an astonishing assortment of people, and seems to have got along with most of them. His books refuse to be neatly filed into existing genres. Bruce Chatwin was, and is, hard to pin down.
I must say that I came to this book with the wrong expectations, assuming that the justification for publishing a collection of someone’s letters would be an inherent interest in the letters themselves, in the case of a writer, simply that writing was what they were good at. That does not quite apply here. There are occasional sparks, flashes of insight and appealing prose that make you see why this traveller was also an author. But if this is, as Elizabeth Chatwin’s preface has it, ‘a last example of a traditional form of communication’, it certainly isn’t the best. Too many letters deal only with travel arrangements and the details of art sales. Important information for both sender and recipient, but hardly relevant to other readers. By this I do not mean to imply that Chatwin should have been writing more interesting epistles – he did not sit down at his typewriter to entertain future readers of letter collections. But I do think that the book would have benefited from a more rigorous selection. Under the Sun is a wonderful book if you can’t get enough of Chatwin, but it took me quite a while before I was drawn in to this wandering life. And then what fascinated me was that at the centre of it all was still a question mark, an empty space on the map.
In his introduction, Nicholas Shakespeare emphasises the private, uncensored view of Chatwin that his letters present, as contrasted with the varied impressions he left on the world – the opinion of his friends, for example, ranging from his having ‘no sense of humour’ to being ‘colossally funny’. And where better to find the real writer than in the letters he dashed off without the world looking over his shoulder? Here, at last, this fat volume says, is the definitive collection. Here is Bruce Chatwin himself, all in one place. But that is an illusion. The letters answer no questions. As he always did in life, Chatwin escapes.
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…and then it was December 31st, 2009. Another year just flew by, and a new one is anxious to get started. 
