Isla Negra: A Notebook (1964)

Charles Tomlinson, "Overdoing the generosity", a review of Isla Negra: A Notebook. Times Literary Supplement, March 25, 1983, p. 286

Although I'd like to, I can't recommend this collection unreservedly. Maybe if I knew more about Neruda's background or Chilean history, it would resonate more deeply with me, but at times I found these works overblown and clumsy. Alastair Reid's translation, however, is excellent and the layout of this bilingual edition is great for those like me who have only passable Spanish.

In his afterword to this edition, Enrico Mario Santí detects a ‘gradual fraying away of the biographical thread’ throughout the five books presented here, and a ‘shedding [of] the rhetoric of autobiography for the present meditations of the still changing poet’. Indeed the last book, Sonata crítica, I found brilliant (or brilliant in parts). My favourites include: 'Tal vaz tenemos tiempo' (Maybe we have time); the Kafkaesque 'El largo día jueves' (The long day called Thursday); and the visceral and whimsical 'Atención al mercado' (Look to the market).

For a contemporary overview in Spanish (including detail on all five books) see the review by Emir Rodríguez Monegal at http://tinyurl.com/gdh8h.