Word: neruda
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...Neruda re-entered the political arena in 1969 to run on the C.P. ticket for president of Chile. He withdrew his nomination in favor of the Popular Unity Party candidate, his friend Salvador Allende. Allende's victory began Chile's revolution that would end so tragically three years later with the help of the Kissingers and Nixons. But while it lasted it represented to Neruda hope, decency and humanity...
...Neruda would just live to see the generals and fascists have their way. He wrote the last entry in the Memoirs three days after Allende's assassination: "...the tanks went into action, many tanks, fighting heroically against a single man: the President of the Republic of Chile, Salvadore Allende, who was waiting for them in his office, with no other company but his great heart, surrounded by smoke and flames." Five days later the poet for whom Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize in 1964 died heartbroken, having witnessed in his own country the same tragedy he had seen...
...Neruda's Memoirs are both moving and somehow unfulfilling. They are filled with philosophy and hope, much as is his poetry; and entangle the reader into an emotionally exhausting extent in the triumphs and tragedies of history. But the function of memoirs is to make a person more accessible, Neruda's don't bring us much closer to the poet than his verses already did. In a sense, the Memoirs are the prose form of his poetry--both are filled with nature, indignation and politics. And to a reader of Neruda's poetry, his Memoirs will contain little that...
...Memoirs do give us wonderful sketches of Neruda's friends and contemporaries--Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Eduardo Frei, Soong Ch'ing Ling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen, and Cesar Vallejo among others--but they somehow leave us without the personal detail of Neruda himself. The Memoirs, for instance, barely mention Neruda's first wife or marriage, an 18-year venture--and have no more than one or two dozen specific time references...
...Neruda prefers to stick to the philosophical rather than the mundane and perhaps it is the voyeur in us that is left feeling unfulfilled. We learn about Neruda, the poet-philosopher, but little about Neruda, the fallible man, demystified and much like us. The impression left from the Memoirs is of a man almost too selfless, too moral, too forgiving. His only flaw seems to be a culturally-determined sexism...