NOW AVAILABLE - This will be the first time Bruce Chatwin’s first novel has been published in e-format, making it available for e-tablet readers. This edition also contains an “illustrated biography of Bruce Chatwin, including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.” “He never thought of abroad. He wanted to live with Lewis for ever and ever; to eat the same food; wear the same clothes; share a bed; and swing an axe in the same trajectory. There were four [...]

This one blew me away. So simple; so complex. So small; so big. I finished it a week ago, but I've been holding off on reviewing it until I could find the right words. I still haven't. Until I do, I'll just leave these stars here and tell you: this is one is pure gold.

I've never read Chatwin before but his name immediately brings to my mind voyages and creates beguiling images of distant lands. Meanwhile inOn the Black Hillwe receive ordinary though unusual in its simplicity story, set on the farm called "The Vision " on the english-wales border. Chatwin effortlessly and with great charm and discreet humor painted hymn to the unchanging rhythm of life, hard work and carefully cultivated Welsh separateness. With keen eye described the small, closed community, [...]

A warm-hearted and somewhat bleak tale of identical twin brothers, Benjamin and Lewis, living out their lives together on a rural farm on the border of Wales and England. The initial scenes of their comfortable routines in their 80’s are followed by a step back to the origin of their lives soon after the marriage of their parents at the end of the 19th century. They settle into the life of tenant sheep farmers, fixing up an old farmhouse they call “The Vision” close by the beautiful “Bla [...]

I mostly read this during our trip to Hay-on-Wye earlier in the month, and feel it is worthy of being called a modern classic. It has echoes of D.H. Lawrence and especially Thomas Hardy, and it’s a pleasantly offbeat look at the developments of the twentieth century as seen through the lives of Welsh identical twins Benjamin and Lewis Jones. Opening in the 1980s, when the brothers are eccentric old gents sleeping side by side in their late parents’ bed, the book then retreats to the beginnin [...]

Twin boys, Lewis and Benjamin Jones, were born in 1900 on a farm on the border of Radnorshire, Wales and Herefordshire, England. The identical Welsh twins spent more than eighty years together with the stronger Lewis doing the heavier work on the farm, while Benjamin handled the finances and birthing the lambs. Their one push into the modern world was buying a tractor. They had a telepathic relationship, knowing the other's thoughts and feeling the other's pain.The book is composed of experience [...]

This is a nice, quiet little novel to pick up when you don't want anything upsetting or scary or suspenseful to read. It's very much place-driven and character-driven rather than dependent on an exciting plot. Chatwin covered 80 years in 250 pages, so there's no excess prose or boring passages. The beauty of the book is the way the author carries you away to a sheltered little farming community on the border of Wales and England. With very few words he richly creates all the small-town provincia [...]

Take Haruki Murakami's novel, Kafka on the Shore. A delight to its juvenile readers, and why wouldn't it? Lots of props here: cats talking to humans, frogs falling like rain from the sky, a son having sex with his mother, a brother-and-sister love scene, killings, ghosts. Even the title hints of fantasy. After reading it, however, you feel empty. Like you've spent new year's eve all alone, you've watched the fireworks in the sky consume themselves, then you sleep with no remembrance of any joy.N [...]

The story of a Welsh farming family focusing especially on twin brothers, Lewis and Benjamin. Having recently read a biography of Chatwin by N Shakespeare, I had already encountered several of the “characters” here. L&B are based upon two farming brothers introduced to Chatwin by his friend, Penelope Betjeman. Similarly, some of the other characters evolved in this way. It was therefore difficult for me to see this always as a work of fiction.Beautifully written in spare clear prose it i [...]

Se este romance tivesse menos oitenta personagens, talvez o relato dos oitenta anos de vida dos gémeos Jones fosse muito mais interessante.

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Nabokov once states that all great stories are fairy tales in the sense that each work of fiction was a magical creation of a new world, 'On The Black Hill' is broadly speaking a "realistic" work of fiction but Chatwin is able to imbue it (especially the depiction of the Jones brothers childhood) with a magic, not with the magic of fiction but the magic of life. 'On The Black Hill' is the story of the lives of two twins in rural Wales. Nothing much happens in their lives, neither travel further [...]

From BBC Radio 4 - Book at Bedtime:Iestyn Jones reads from Bruce Chatwin's novel about the lives of identical twin brothers Lewis and Benjamin Jones, on their farm in the Welsh Marches.1/5. The courtship and marriage of the brothers' parents: Mary, their literate and well-travelled mother, and their ill-tempered, inarticulate father Amos.2/5: From earliest childhood, the twins seem to feel each other's happiness and pain, and often speak in a private language. By adolescence, differences begin t [...]

This was a novel of almost unutterable beauty. Chatwin's writing is beyond lyrical and has a real rooting in time and place. Oh, to be in Wales at the turn of the last century! I can just imagine how bleak the winters were, and how spectacular the summers. It was poignant to view the passing of time and the changes it wrought. This story felt different because of the time span covered. I've read plenty of novels set in the rural 1900s, but have not yet seen one modernise this world as Chatwin di [...]

Chatwin had a beautiful way of writing, usually described as spare. I collect sentences that please my ear and write them out by hand in a hard-backed notebook. I read On the Black Hill in 1982, when it was published, and among the half-dozen or so sentences I copied were the following:"Crossing the pasture one evening, he watched the swallows glinting low over the dandelion clocks, and the sheep standing out against the sunset, each one ringed with an aureole of gold--and understood why the Lam [...]

Always I have associated Bruce Chatwin's work with travel to far-off places. This time, with On the Black Hill, he threw me for a loop. We the a whole lifetime lived in one place, on the border between Radnor (in Wales) and Hereford (in England). The lifetime is of a pair of twins named Lewis and Benjamin Jones, two bachelors who slept with each other in their mother's bed on the old farm called The Vision. Because I had a suspicion of what the book was about, I did not expect to like it. Not on [...]

(To be clear - I listened to the abridged reading on BBC radio, not the book itself. )Difficult to describe this! About closeness and loneliness all at the same time - can that be? It felt as if something sad was always imminent, a suspended state of unease- the brothers were real enough to me that I worried about them! Don't think I can write a proper review without having read the full book, though.

2.5 stars - Metaphorosis ReviewsBrothers, twins in body and spirit, spend much of their lives together on a farm at the Welsh-English border.I've not read Bruce Chatwin before, but have heard of him mainly as a travel writer. Certainly, in On the Black Hill, his prose is simple and unembroidered. However, he demonstrates that it is also possible to be too plain. The events of the book, tangled and of great potential interest, pass by like notes in an almanac. On this day, this happened; on the n [...]

A beautifully written, rather brooding story that's set in the wild but beautiful Welsh countryside and follows the lives of two twin brothers who were born at the very beginning of the 20th century. From the start they were inseparable and so closely bonded that they seemed to have been able to sense when one or the other was in danger or pain. They remained bachelors all their lives, sharing everything as they continued to live on the farm that their father had bought years ago. The book's cha [...]

This took a while to grow on me. I expected to be about two twin men aged 80, but actually it's about from before they were born up until they're 80, and the farming community they live in, and so has to move very speedily through the years without much pause to look around and reflect. And that's what I found difficult; it was only by the time the book finished that I got used to this speed. It's full of odd characters which I loved, the kind of people I remember from my rural childhood, tramps [...]

ein sehr wunderbares und anrührendes Buch.

This was a fine novel and I enjoyed it but it was radically unlike anything else I’ve read from Mr. Chatwin. More measured, less eccentric, but a very warm and mildly humorous and satisfying read. It reminded me somehow of G.B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer LePage. Chatwin was a famous traveler, but On the Black Hill is a story about staying put. His two main characters, Benjamin and Lewis Jones, spend their whole lives on or near the family farm in the Welsh borders. The story spans a perio [...]

'For forty two years, Lewis and Benjamin Jones slept side-by-side in their parents' bed at their farm ', 20 Dec 2014Set on the Welsh/English border, this is the story of elderly twins in a remote rural community, opening in the late 19th century, with their parents' courtship, and concluding in the 70s, with the twins in old age.As other reviewers have observed, nothing massive happens; there is interaction with the local aristocrats, the Bickertons; with various neighbours, notably the unfortun [...]

Reading this book is like taking a trip to a farm on the English-Welsh border. There isn't much happening and the everyday things that are normal happenings to us are a big deal at The Vision Farm. Chatwin's writing is very gentle and gives us a feeling of adoration for the two brothers that have such devotion to each other. Without much of a plot, the book is place driven and character driven. I would recommend it to anyone who loves to read about rural nature.

Brilliant book! A gentle, meandering story about the lives of twin brothers who live out their years in a rural farm on the Welsh border. It's one of those quiet books where not much actually happens, there's no big story arc as such. A story that is very much rooted in the beautiful minutiae of everyday life.

This was dazzling. I need to reread it soon.

Super. I am sure I'll read this again someday. Nuff said.

I read "In Patagonia" years ago, but, other than that, I do not know Bruce Chatwin’s books. “On the Black Hill” seems to me like a Hardy novel without the coincidences. This is not me being clever (or trying to be!). This is an image called into being by Chatwin himself, where his female protagonist, Mary, sits reading:“She was reading ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’. She liked it less than “The Woodlanders’, which she had read the week before, and Hardy’s ‘coincidences’ had be [...]

"--they would stand over her patchwork quilt and peer at the black velvet stars and the hexagons of printed calico that had once been her dresses."Identical twin brothers Lewis and Benjamin sleep in their parent's 1899 oak four-poster bed, hung with the cretonne hangings of larkspur and roses their mother made as a newlywed, with linen sheets worn to holes, the mattresses sunk into two troughs. On the bed was the patchwork quilt their mother had made, "to remember me by," cut from the calico dre [...]

This is the story of identical twins Lewis and Benjamin and their curious life on an isolated farm in the shadow of The Black Hills on the border between England and Wales. It opens in 1979 as they live their isolated life in the farmhouse they have lived in since their birth at the turn of the 20th century. The book then details their life through the century and the events and people that shape their story. This includes the strange romance of their parents and the life of a mother who despite [...]