Memoirs [B2121]

1977 HCDJ 1st edition, with minor dust jacket and cover wear - and nice clean text pages. The classic and deeply moving memoir by Pablo Neruda, the most widely read political poet of our time and winner of the Nobel Prize. The south of Chile was a frontier wilderness when Pablo Neruda was born in 1904. In these memoirs he retraces his bohemian student years in Santiago; his sojourns as Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Java, in Spain during the civil war, and in Mexico; and his service as a Chilean senator. Neruda, a Communist, was driven from his senate seat in 1948, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After a year in hiding, he escaped on horseback over the Andes and then to Europe; his travels took him to Russia, Eastern Europe, and China before he was finally able to return home in 1952. The final section of the memoirs was written after the coup in 1972 that overthrew Neruda's friend Salvador Allende. Many of the century's most important literary and artistic figures were Neruda's friends, and figure in his memoirs--Garcia Lorca, Aragon, Picasso, and Rivera, among them--and also such political leaders as Gandhi, Nehru, Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara. In his uniquely expressive prose, Neruda not only explains his views on poetry and describes the circumstances that inspired many of his poems, but he creates a revealing record of his life as a poet, a patriot, and one of the twentieth century's true men of conscience.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Simply fascinating. I am an admirer of Neruda's poetry and felt it a great privilege to have read his memoir. Historically and politically, it appears he's had a hand in placing Chile on the map."; "Reading Pablo Neruda's Memoirs felt less like reading and more like standing in the tide-pulled forward even when I wanted to step back. There are sections I struggled with, the sexual passages heavy and careless, asking the reader to bear what the writer never pauses to question. Those pages made me flinch. They made me angry. They made me put the book down and breathe. And still, I returned. Because Neruda knows how to witness. He kneels to the earth. He listens to salt and stone, to birdsong and rain, and writes as if the land itself asked him to remember it. His love poems-excessive, aching, flawed-still throb with devotion. His idea of country is not a flag but a body: wounded, exiled, beloved. This is not a book that asks for forgiveness. It asks for attention. It demands we hold beauty and harm in the same hands, and decide what it means to keep reading anyway. I don't excuse him. I read him. And in that tension-between awe and refusal-I find what it means to be a witness, too."; "This book altered my entire perception of reality & inspired me over and over again."; "Neruda's life is complicated, I will go on respecting and loving his work, learning from the good in his life, and never forgetting the bad. I understand how some can denounce all of his work, but it's had too great of an impact on me for me to do the same."