The Neruda Case
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- 6,49 €
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- 6,49 €
Descripción editorial
In 1970's Chile Pablo Neruda, the Nobel-prize winning poet, is close to death, and he senses the end of an era in Chilean politics but there is one final secret he must resolve. He recruits Cayetano Brulé, a young Cuban rogue, as his "own private Maigret" and lends Brulé the novels of Simenon as a crash course in the role of private detective. Brulé must travel across the world, through Neruda's past and the political faiths he has espoused, retracing the poet's life from Fidel Castro's Cuba to Berlin, Mexico City to Bolivia. Brulé desperately tries to fulfil Neruda's final request amid the brutal beginning of Pinochet's dictatorship while all the poet once believed in is swept away. Evocative and romantic, The Neruda Case spans lies and truth, travelling between uneasy peace and political coup, from life to death. Brulé, a daydreamer and reluctant detective, is lost among Latin America's uncertainties, venality and corruption while his first case introduces one of the great characters of international crime fiction. Among the pleasures of The Neruda Case is its provocative fictional portrait of Pablo Neruda, as the poet re-evaluates his life and begins to question abandoning those he loved for his poetry. This is the first English language translation of Roberto Ampuero's atmospheric Brulé detective novels and brings South American noir to a new audience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chilean author Ampuero's first novel published in English, a moving fictional interpretation of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda's final days in 1973, appropriately enough sings with poetic metaphor. Neruda, who's ill with cancer as Chile teeters toward upheaval because of his friend President Allende's reform platform, seeks out unemployed Cuban Cayetano Brul in Valpara so and hires him to investigate the whereabouts of a former acquaintance, Dr. ngel Bracamonte. Never mind that Brul is no detective. The aging poet cum political activist persuades the young Brul to become his "own private Maigret," and travel to Mexico City, the last place Neruda saw Bracamonte. The mission seems cut and dried, except Neruda has not only withheld critical information, he has sworn Brul to secrecy. Nobody must know the identity of who Brul is looking for or why he is looking for him. The plot twists from Mexico City to East Germany, from lies to truth, from uneasy peace to political coup, from life to death. Read this one as much for the story as for the wonderful way Ampuero has with words.