Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) is one of Latin America's best known poets, and perhaps its most controversial. He is adored by readers for the passionate love lyrics penned during his early years in his native Chile, and respected by fellow poets and literary critics for the dark, hypnotic verses he composed during his later, lonely years as a diplomat based in the Far East. Rarely are the life and works of a writer so intimately and dramatically bound up as they are with Pablo Neruda. In "Pablo Neruda" Dominic Moran takes a detailed and often critical look at this relationship, focusing as much on what the poetry sometimes strategically hides about Neruda the poet, the lover, and the political proselytizer, as what it reveals. The author describes a life that was marked by an increasingly militant communism, the seeds of which can be traced to Neruda's experiences in Spain during the early months of the Spanish Civil War. Throughout the 1950s and 60s the poet became a literary torchbearer for the International Left, and he spent his final years campaigning to bring socialism to his beloved Chile. Sadly, he lived just long enough to see his hero Salvador Allende unseated by Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup. "Pablo Neruda" paints a fascinating, if not always flattering, picture of one of the most prodigiously gifted but also one of the most equivocal literary figures of the twentieth century. It will appeal to all who know Neruda's verse and wish to learn more of his life, and also to the wide audience for Latin American literature, politics and history.

About the Author

Dominic Moran is a lecturer and tutor in Spanish at Christ Church College, Oxford University. He has written books and articles on a range of twentieth-century Spanish American writers including Julio Cortazar and Alejo Carpentier. He has also published a critical edition of Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.

Reviews

... as Moran shows in this absorbing study, you might have to take away the dross by the truckload, but what remains is real poetry - among the greatest of our age. The Scotsman