Exiled in Spain during Chile's Pinochet years, Neruda's close
friend and political associate Teitelboim wrote this first major
biography of the Chilean poet. Teitelboim's approach is sound on
the whole. Neruda, who began to write poetry at eight and never
stopped, was a force of nature, his genius an insoluble riddle.
Teitelboim quotes generously from the poems and seeks their
immediate source in the details of Chilean politics and Neruda's
love life. He doesn't bludgeon or needle the work with textual,
Freudian, or any other form of cant-ridden analysis. On the other
hand, he's so close to his subject he can trip over its feet.
Evoking the Chilean landscape, he sometimes writes a pale pastiche
of the master. Describing the Bohemian intellectual scene of
Santiago circa 1920, he drops names so freely an American reader
may be bewildered. In his brief, episodic chapters, though, the
savory anecdotes multiply. Neruda had a great appetite for love and
friendship and the improvised life. Tales of his early stint as
honorary Chilean consul in Rangoon, his years in Madrid with Garcia
Lorca, are delightful and heart-rending. If only the tone weren't
so relentlessly post-Stalinist p.c. Lorca's being gay is not
mentioned. Neither are the battles between anarchists and
communists in the Spanish Civil War, or between Stalinists and the
Trotsky circle in Mexico in the 40's. Neruda's political
involvement had its ironies, not hinted at here. The result is a
flattening of his complex, contradictory character in the later
chapters. What does come through is the long history of American
meddling in Chile, going back to the 40's. Still, Teitelboim's take
on Neruda, his friend of 40 years, is unique. He knew the poet's
mistress/muses when they were young and fresh. He knows them now,
old, frail, and querulous. Shifting readily between vibrant past
and faded present, he has written a work of elegiac charm, one that
reads like a novel whose real subject, as in Neruda's beloved
Proust, is the ravages wrought by passing Time. (Kirkus Reviews)
A biography of the noted Chilean poet, written by a Chilean
novelist who was Neruda's friend and confidante for many years.
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