When my childhood days were spent in long, boring visits to relatives and parents’ friends, one of the pastimes was to comb the titles on their obscure libraries. After long hours made bearable by bookshelf curiosity, I finally came to the conclusion that the most common book on Spanish-speaking households was not Cervantes’ Don Quijote, but Pablo Neruda’s Confieso que he vivido (Memoirs). Every home I visited had this book! It made me wonder… The ubiquitous sight of the broad white spine and bold black letters slowly took me to the conclusion that I could never consider myself a truly cultured person of Spanish-language heritage if I had not read this book…
And the thickness and prestige scared me to death.
I had come to believe that reading Memoirs would be a kind of rite of passage: I imagined myself reading it on a long train journey, maybe the Orient-Express, where the mystic combination of journey and book would change my life. Continua a leggere Memorias