One of the best collection of chronicles out there is Cees Nooteboom's Nomad's Hotel. In it you will find a chronicle about his pilgrimage to visit another great chronicler, Tim Robinson, author of the Proust-sized, sui generis The Stones of Aran. Robinson's new book is Connemara: a Little Gaelic Kingdom, which is reviewed in The New Statesman by none other than Brian Dillon, the author of In the Dark Room and The Hypocondriacs and the best chronicler to emerge in England after Alain de Botton.
The last paragraph of Dillon's review can fairly stand as a detailed definition of the chronicle genre:
As ever with Robinson, the pleasures of his vagrant, exacting style are many. The seductive accumulation of stories or topographical details frequently culminates in reflections at once abstract and lovely, as in his concluding remarks about the intricacy of the coast: "The natural world is largely composed of such recalcitrant entities, over which the geometry of Euclid, the fairy tale of lines, circles, areas and volumes we are told at school, has no authority." Long, digressive tramps through natural or cultural history terminate in aphoristic clarity: "There are places where place proliferates . . . There is no overarching story other than the dominance of story itself." Except that, for Robinson, such sudden vistas and insights are preludes to the renewed work of immersion in place. As he wrote in his diary 30 years ago: "I could wander onwards up here for ever."
No comments:
Post a Comment