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60
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
68/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Pablo Neruda, Hardie St. Martin, Adrian Nathan West
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
June 22, 2021
Southern Chile was an open frontier when the beloved poet Pablo Neruda was born there in 1904. A motherless, pensive child in the wild, he began writing poems long before quitting the countryside for Santiago, where he spent his bohemian student years. From there, his memoir follows his travels as a globetrotting Chilean consul--including a stint in Spain during its civil war, and in Mexico, where he attracted attention for aiding a man suspected of conspiring to assassinate Leon Trotsky--and his short-lived 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, then to Europe and Asia. The memoirs conclude shortly after the coup in 1972 that overthrew his close friend Salvador Allende, Chile's first democratically elected president, as Neruda himself battled cancer. Now expanded to include newly discovered material, The Complete Memoirs is the definitive edition of Neruda's classic memoir.
What The Reviewers Say
The memoirs of Pablo Neruda (1904-73), the great Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, first translated into English in 1977, have been newly expanded here in subtle and significant ways with the addition of previously unpublished or incomplete manuscripts, explanatory editorial notes, and an instructive chronology.
It is impossible not to feel a thrill of expectation upon opening The Complete Memoirs by Pablo Neruda. But once a reader discovers what’s actually on its pages, the title’s claim of completeness—with its promise of juicy restorations and the accretion of long-lost chapters written by the great Chilean poet—seems no better than a gimmick to sell afresh a book that was first published in English translation 44 years ago.
The fresh material is skillfully woven into the original memoir, which Neruda called his 'journey around myself,' with evocations of his family and childhood, global travels, friends and foes, carnal desires, aspirations and achievements as a poet, and celebration of the natural world.
