Memoirs
Finished days before he died, in the weeks after Pinochet coup: consulships in Rangoon and Madrid, the Spanish war, escape over the Andes on horseback.
Neruda’s posthumous memoir, finished days before his death in the weeks after Pinochet’s coup, moving between his consulships in Rangoon and Madrid, the Spanish Civil War, exile on horseback over the Andes, and a chapter on words that is really a prose poem about language itself.
Recommended by 1 Person
Maria Popova
I know of no greater love letter to language, to its simple pleasures and its infinite complexities, than the one Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) tucks into his posthumously published Memoirs (public library) under the heading “Words” — a stream-of-consciousness prose poem nested between chapters about his changing life in Chile and his eventual choice to leave Santiago, “a captive city between walls of snow,” half a lifetime before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for “a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams.”
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