Word: neruda
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Skarmeta, like Llosa, chooses a writer--Chilean poet-hero Pablo Neruda--as his protagonist. The lines vibrate with metaphor. Poetry intermingles with the text of the play in a way that emphasizes the living spirit of Neruda in the hearts of revolutionaries...
...From early morning," Skarmeta's Neruda says, "the ocean begins its fantastic way of rising. It seems to be kneading an endless loaf of bread...
DESPITE THEIR brilliance, Llosa and Skarmeta seem to strain for metaphors and one-liners. ("Let's not carry democracy to the point of taking a vote to see who our father is," says Skarmeta's ever-composing Neruda.) On stage, an actor's delivery might compensate for much of the stiffness, but in print, it is trying...
...Spirits is essentially a family saga encompassing four generations. The country is unnamed, though the character called the Candidate and later the President is manifestly Salvador Allende. Similarly, the Poet, whose verse everyone in the book seems to have memorized, is clearly Chile's late Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. Ghostly happenings are commonplace in the great house of the "spirits" belonging to the Truebas. Eccentrics abound in that household. Rosa the Beautiful, for example, possesses a head of green hair that hangs "like a botanical mantle" down to her waist. Nicolas Trueba moves from one enterprise to another, successively teaching...
...must cope not just with the wounds of the past five years but with a tradition of violence that is as old as the country. "The blood of dead peasants has not dried, time does not dry it, rain does not erase it from the roads," the poet Pablo Neruda once wrote. "A bloody flavor soaks the land, the bread and wine in Salvador." Duarte, slowly, cautiously, is trying to cleanse his land...