Neruda is a remarkable writer and poet, publishing several books before turning twenty. His best-known work is Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924), a poetic book most read by young Spanish people of various generations. It is an exultant book of youth full of heartbreaking passion, in which the poet reflects on the sadness of lost love.

 In many of his works, he incorporates the expressive findings of the literary avant-gardes. His powerful inspiration finds a suitable channel in Surrealism, which allows him maximum freedom of rhetorical imagination while diving into the depths of his soul, a good sample being  Residencia en la tierra (two parts 1933 and 1935),  a dazzling, audacious work of hermetic poetry composed of dark intuitions and hallucinatory images, revealing a nightmare vision, with verses that transpire a bitter and deeply negative concept of human being, a mortal creature lost in a chaotic, shattered, meaningless world.

It is in the ideology of Marxism that he finds a new faith in humanity. The most representative work of this phase is his ambitious book  Canto general (1950),  a vast ensemble song of praise of the lands of America, its people, and its historical vicissitudes between conquerors and liberators. A combative kind of poetry, in a vibrant epic tone, the author deals in great detail with the political discourse that explains the historical vicissitudes of those lands. 

Considered one of the greatest Spanish poets of the 20th century, his overwhelmingly vital personality reflects in the power and richness of his literary work.

Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada

Residencia en la tierra

Canto general

Cantos ceremoniales

Geografía infructuosa

Las uvas y el viento

Estravagario

This collection of poems is one of the most famous works of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, launching the author to fame when he was only 19 years old. It is also one of the most renowned literary works of the 20th century in the Spanish language.

Poetry

The Latin American boom is a literary phenomenon that emerged in the 1960s when a prodigious renewal of the Latin American narrative took place. Readers from all over the world discovered authors as representative today as Carpentier, Rulfo, Cortázar, Borges, Fuentes, Donoso, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez. The works of these writers are characterized by a great thematic variety, with a preference for the urban novel (Cortázar, Fuentes) and a renewed treatment of the rural (Rulfo, García Márquez). 

Defining feature is the masterful fusion of the fantastic and the real, what is known as 'magical realism', the most representative example of which is García Márquez's extensive novel Cien años de soledad. These authors produce a total renovation of the structure of the story, often breaking the plotline, with habitual changes from the perspective of the narrator and jumps in the time during the action. The experimentation is so extraordinary that it ends up affecting the language itself, overlapping styles and registers and often distorting the syntax and lexicon, many of the authors of this time becoming icons of the history of literature.

Latinoamerican Literature

García Márquez writes Cien años de soledad, novel that recounts a century in the life of the Buendía family, today it is still considered a masterpiece of Latin American literature and one of the classic examples of magical realism.

Mario Vargas Llosa writes La ciudad y los perros, novel about the one related to the violent experiences of the interned cadets of the last three years of Secondary Education of the Leoncio Prado Military School in the capital of Peru.

Julio Cortazar writes Rayuela, a novel whose story puts the reader's subjectivity at stake and has multiple endings.

Carlos Fuentes writes La muerte de Artemio Cruz,  a milestone in the Latin American Boom.

María Luisa Bombal writes La amortajada,  novel that reflects the social conditions of the 1930s in Chile.

Spanish Bites

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Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924)

By Pablo Neruda

Time Period: Latinoamerican Literature

Genre: Poetry

Spanish Bites

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