NOWHERE IS A PLACE: Travels in Patagonia...

NOWHERE IS A PLACE: Travels in Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, photographs by Jeff Gnass (Sierra Club Books: $18; 112 pp., illustrated). “Nowhere” is based on a lecture Paul Theroux and the late Bruce Chatwin gave at the Royal Geographical Society Hall in London in 1985. Patagonia is generally thought to derive from pata, foot in Spanish, referring to the outsize feet of its fictional inhabitants. But Chatwin traces the name to Patagon, a monster in the anonymous 16th-Century romance, “Primaleon of Greece.” Both men praise the unique beauty of Patagonia’s plains and mountains, and Gnass’ striking photographs of strange, bleak landscapes enhance their accounts of this remote land.