Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life - Softcover

This is a magnificent biography (Harold Pinter)

‘Feinstein's biography is fuelled by an infectious enthusiasm for the poems: this is its greatest strength ... it is crammed with adventure stories, narrow scrapes, passionate encounters' (Andrew Motion, Guardian)

‘A magnificently researched work ... compelling ... Feinstein brilliantly elucidates the main driving forces behind Neruda's life and work' (Independent)

‘Feinstein has written an excellent book on Neruda's life, personality, poetry and politics. He uses an immense range of written sources, as well as interviews with those who knew Neruda' (Irish Independent)

‘Feinstein's impressive life, the first such major undertaking in English, is meticulously researched and features a great deal of newly translated material' (Sunday Tribune)

Forty years after Pablo Neruda's death, his poetry continues to be read all over the world. His range is vast: from the lyricism of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and the melancholy of Residence on Earth to the direct simplicity of the Elemental Odes and the epic grandeur of the Canto General. Few Nobel laureates have enjoyed such enduring popularity. Pablo Neruda was a complicated man, both politically and emotionally. In this first authoritative biography, Adam Feinstein draws on revealing interviews with his closest friends, acquaintances and surviving relatives, as well as newly discovered documents. He follows Neruda's life from a sickly childhood in Chile to political engagement and literary fame, until his death in 1973, within days of the death of Salvador Allende in the coup that brought Pinochet to power. This acclaimed biography, now updated with an afterword about the recent exhumation of Neruda's remains, tells the full story of an iconic twentieth-century figure for the first time.