In this wonderful biography of the writer and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, whose centennial takes place in 2004, Jorge Edwards recreates masterfully the life of the poet and the story of three generations of writers, artists, and thinkers around the world. He carries the reader along that long, eventful, and contradictory intellectual and vital trajectory, both personal and collective. So many known characters, so much cultural, social, and political activity surrounded Neruda that what Edwards knows about him, having been his friend for twenty years and private secretary for some time, reveals something about the history of almost everyone. As Edwards defines this book, it is « a very personal book of memoirs in which the main character is Pablo Neruda.