[Bruce Chatwin] writes a clipped, lapidary prose that compresses worlds into pages. "In Patagonia," an account of his wanderings in southern Argentina, won high praise five years ago for its witty obliquity, elegantly economical descriptions, wealth of curious historical and paleontological data, and perky word portraits of the drunken gauchos and homesick Scotsmen he encountered in this vast, raw region. The one virtue "In Patagonia" did not conspicuously possess, it seemed to me, was momentum; the traveller so deliberately minimized his personality and obscured his motives that the prose seemed to travel on ghostly legs of its own, snacking on scenery and bits of dialogue where it pleased, and hopping about so airily between past and present, between experienced incident and researched document, that the exotic reality was half-eclipsed by the willful manners of the invisible guide. Mr. Chatwin writes in such short paragraphs that he seems to...