![]() In talking about Neruda, she says, "Pablo was a chronicler of his era. Urrutia has been described as having a Bohemian streak. ![]() While the political climate of Chile often made their life challenging, in reading this book, the reader gets a sense of what it's like to spend time with Neruda, an experience I certainly would have loved to have. We have a chance in this book to get inside the heart and soul of Urrutia who was Neruda's lover, muse, wife, and eventually his widow. Neruda's poems have moved me during so many times in my life, his passion and love for being in love leave the reader awestruck. While this is not a new book, it's a which in a large way inspired me to create my poetry chapbook, AN IMAGINARY AFFAIR. At once humorous and heart-breaking, Urrutia's story makes for a fine domestic complement to Neruda's own lush memoirs. In a conversational style, she brings Neruda to life, and he emerges as a vibrant, playful, and impatient man driven by unbounded appetites. Reading My Life with Pablo Neruda is like spending a long afternoon with Matilde Urrutia. Harassed by Pinochet's henchmen, she becomes an exile within her own country, mourns the torture and disappearance of loved ones, and finally awakes from the stupor of sorrow and commits herself to using Neruda's words to lash out against the bloody regime. Urrutia then returns to the grim reality she faces in Santiago in the mid-1970s, to describe life under the dictatorship. Here, she reveals the birth of The Captain's Verses and divulges the secrets of their illicit marriage in Italy. Grief-stricken, Urrutia takes refuge in her memories, reeling back through time to recount the heady early days of her twenty-two-year romance with Neruda. ![]() Devastated by the coup, the sixty-nine-year-old Neruda dies a few days later of a heart attack. My Life with Pablo Neruda opens with the dramatic events of September 11, 1973, with Augusto Pinochet's overthrow of the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Her voice lifts out of the sorrow and violence of the military dictatorship that precipitated her beloved's death in 1973, to reaffirm the power of Neruda's own passionate voice. But her book is not simply a love story told by a muse it is also a document of her life as the persecuted widow of a national hero. ![]() In My Life with Pablo Neruda, Urrutia reveals her side of their famed romance. The Nobel-laureate Chilean wrote The Captain's Verses and One Hundred Love Sonnets-two of the most celebrated volumes of love lyrics in modern Spanish letters-for her. Matilde Urrutia was poet Pablo Neruda's lover, muse, wife, and widow. ![]()
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