In Patagonia was Bruce Chatwin's first published book, and it catapulted its author to immediate literary success. The publication of the work also marked a seminal moment in the literary development of the travelogue, with critics and writers alike seizing on In Patagonia's elliptical narrative technique and largely-absent narrator as innovations in the genre. The work's success, both critically and commercially, would mean that Chatwin would regularly be referred to as a 'travel writer'; a label both displeasing to the author and fundamentally inaccurate.
In Patagonia marked Chatwin's first book-length engagement with the ideas of nomadism and human restlessness that so preoccupied the author. Much of the central narrative of the work is given over to description of the myriad immigrant communities that constitute Patagonian society. Patagonia functions on both an actual and a metaphorical level; it exists as a tangible (though indistinct) landscape in the work, though it also comes to represent an allegorical location of escape and exile. The work thus operates in a similarly divided fashion.
Before In Patagonia was published in an American edition, Bruce Chatwin wrote to his agent, Deborah Rogers and requested that a number of points be made clear on the edition’s back cover. Key among them was Chatwin’s invitation that the reader choose in their reading between two journeys: one to Patagonia in 1975, the other ‘a symbolic voyage which is a meditation on restlessness and exile.' (qtd. in Shakespeare 311) Though ostensibly a travel narrative, In Patagonia sets itself apart from other works of travel writing by adhering to a underlying thematic, rather than geographical, blueprint. Chatwin set out explicitly to write a meditation on life at the margins, and he shaped the material he found in South America to suit his own ends. Patagonia is the ideal setting for such an undertaking, stuck, as it is, halfway between fact and fiction.
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