Pablo Neruda

More than 30 years after the death of the Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet, millions around the globe continue to woo their lovers with lines from his Twenty Love Poems and And a Song of Despair. Millions more have been enchanted by the emotional directness of the Elemental Odes, the epic power of the Canto General and the dazzling lyricism of his later love poetry. Neruda was a complicated man, both politically and emotionally. There were three marriages and many love affairs - and Feinstein draws on interviews with the poet's closest friends, acquaintances and surviving relatives, as well as newly discovered documents, to explore those complexities. He follows Neruda's development from a sickly, sensitive child in southern Chile in the early years of the century to a writer of growing fame whose political sympathies led to a friendship with Federico Garcia Lorca and active support for the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. Then came a year in hiding from Chile's dictator, under the threat of death, before a dramatic escape to exile, and through it all his controversial loyalty to Stalinism even after Stalin's crimes had been exposed.