Perhaps because he sees so little love in his life, an older man in a village in the Ecuadorian rain forest insatiably reads stories about it. Sepulveda sets up his protaganist as an isolated man, whose cleverness and wisdom separate him from even the folks in his native village. So, this man's true worth is even more unknown to an interloping Gringo, whom the man does not want to fight, but must nonetheless.

In fact, the old man is forced through a strange circumstance to do something utterly distasteful to him - something injurious to the natural fauna of his land.

Thematically, we have encroaching development, clash of culture (even between generations within the small village), and the coarseness that governs so much of modern interaction.

"The Old Man who Read Love Stories" gives us the loneliness of a man who dreams of love. This book has a good translation (don't have the name, sorry), and gives us a glimpse of an unusual milieu, and lessons of interactions that arise there. I stop short of giving a ringing endorsement, but do not regret having read it. ( )

Antonio José Bolivar Proaño came to Amazonia as a young man with his wife. They were poor people from the mountains of Ecuador, lured to move by the government's empty promises of better life. They became settlers, knowing nothing about life in the jungle. She died soon and he barely survived, not on his own account but because he got help from the native people called the Shuari. He was open enough to accept that help and that saved him.

He lived with the Shuari for years, he did learn to know the jungle and its ways. Finally the Shuari said that he was like them, even though he was not one of them. Then he made one mistake and once again he had to leave. He came back to the settlers -- for he knew he could not survive in the jungle on his own -- to find out that what once was barely more than camp is now a small town. But nothing much has changed. People still don't want to learn to live in the jungle as it is, but to fight it and to beat it. The outcome is destructive.

He stays in the town, but remains an outsider who is tolerated because the community occasionally needs his abilities and knowledge of the jungle.

He finds out he can read and more specifically he finds out what he wants to read are stories of love greater than anything, love that makes people suffer before it makes them happy in the end. Reading helps him forget the cruelty of people for a while.

This is not a big book but it deals with big things: humanity, nature, and the wrongdoings of the former to the latter. And reading.

In a way it goes deep, but in few words, a lot is left unsaid. The narrative is anecdotal, and on the whole I am not sure I found the connection of the two themes: the ecological message and the old man's reading. There were a few very beautiful sections on each, but...

Unless it is just that reading may help us tolerate all the crap that goes on around us, and even if it does not really help -- reading does not solve a single real problem, it may be just an escape from them, but it isn't as destructive as most of the other things we do.

esdte libra trata de que muchas historias de la vida cotidiana tienen que ver con el amor, y todas las historias que se ven.

Comment a t'il fait en si peu de pages pour nous en dire autant sur l'Amazonie, les ocelots, le peuple Shuar, l'humanité, le pouvoir, l'argent... ?
Le Vieux et le Gros sont des personnages cousins des habitants de Macondo... ( )

After a life spent in the amazon,an elderly Ecuadoran widower, loves to read romance novels. Looking back on his life, he comes to appreciate the Amazonian jungle as the magnificent place it is, and to realize how encroaching civilization has endangered it. Published in Spanish as Un Viejo Que Leía Novelas de Amor ( )