The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, by Luis Sepúlveda (New York : Harvest Books, 1993)
Exiled Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda tells a story of Amazonia. A widowed old man, Antonio José Bolivar Proaño, lives in a hut in El Idilio, an isolated Ecuadorian village near the Nangaritza River. As a young man he and his wife homesteaded in the jungle. Their farm failed and his wife died three years after their arrival, but he stayed on, learning how to live in harmony with the jungle from the Shuar Indians. When he moves to EL Idilio and realizes he can read, “the most important discovery of his whole life,” all he wants is to be left alone with the “love stories” that arrive with the dentist twice a year. But the jungle’s balance is shifting as machines, settlers, gold prospectors, oil drillers, and corrupt politicians encroach on the village, creating a crisis that forces the old man into a confrontation with an ocelet. Atmospheric, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, pulls readers into Ecuador’s lush Amazonian region, both as paradise and commodity.
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“Antonio José Bolîvar took out his false teeth, wrapped them in his handkerchief and, cursing the gringo responsible for the tragedy, the mayor, the gold prospectors, all those who whored on his virgin Amazonia, he chopped off a thick branch with his machete. Leaning on it, he set off in the direction of El Idilio, his hut, and his novels that spoke of love in such beautiful words they sometimes made him forget the barbarity of man.” – from The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, by Luis Sepúlveda
