Memoirs

Under the volcanoes, beside the snow-capped mountains, among the huge lakes, the fragrant, the silent, the tangled Chilean forest… I have come out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world…

Pablo Neruda led the busiest, most impassioned, most dedicated, and, it has been said, happiest of lives-and these exuberant memoirs capture it all.

As intensely lyrical as his world-renowned poetry, they recreate his frontier childhood, his student years in Santiago, his diplomatic missions, his election as senator, his flight from the Chilean police, his 1952 homecoming, and his last years crowded with palms and laurels.

Here, too, the reader will meet some of the century’s most important artistic and political figures: Federico García Lorca, César Vallejo, Rafael Alberti, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Pablo Picasso, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Salvador Allende, whose death, occurring as Neruda completed this book, is mourned in its final pages.