[In Patagonia] is a travel book of sorts, containing a lot of well-digested history of that strange southerly part of Argentina where so many oddly assorted people have turned up: Magellan, Drake, Darwin, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Spanish revolutionaries, Scotch sheep farmers, Jewish merchants, a colony of dour Welshmen, and the author's grandmother's cousin, a shipwrecked sea captain. As he travels south from Buenos Aires, much of the way on foot, Chatwin gives us Patagonia in charged fragments: anecdotes, etymology, landscape, characters, poetry, towns, Patagonian literature, tragic sea stories. The style is the man: detached, humorous, succinct, wry, feeling, energetic, self-effacing: he catches the essence and gives just that, not a word more. In Patagonia may bring to mind The Great Railway Bazaar, but it is a less showoff book: absolutely original, perfectly poised, wise, an unclassifiable classic.

Eve Auchincloss, in a review of "In Patagonia...