It is surely as a story-teller that Chatwin will be remembered, and missed — a story-teller going far beyond the limits of fiction, and assimilating in his tales elements of reportage, autobiography, ethnology, the Continental tradition of the essay, and even gossip. Yet underneath the brilliance of the text, there is a haunting presence, something sparse and solitary and moving, as in Turgenev's prose. When we return to Bruce Chatwin, we find much in him that he has left unsaid. — Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Times Literary Suppement, 16-22 June 1989.
