Never heard of this guy until I taught some ELS classes. He was the subject of one of the chapters...
I asked my students if they heard of the guy, or knew of his I novels. They all did!
Of course, my students never heard of “Go Ask Alice,” or any of the other literary masterpieces I was forced to read in school.
RIP
16 years after "Dog Breath in the Year of the Plague," the best track on "Uncle Meat."
i did read Love in the Time of Cholera... i was on a short visit somewhere, and this book was on a table, so i picked it up and read it... funny thing is, the book had been available at my parents’ home for years and i had never felt compelled to pick it up...
His work has the lyric beauty of the best of Ray Bradbury
The best way to describe his writings is that it helps to know the central and South-American schools of literature.
It has a slower pace and uses a lot of “color”, descriptions of place and mood, putting emotions into words instead of actions.
A good start would be the poems of Pablo Neruda (also a communist), but who was perhaps the best poet in the 20th Century.
http://www.poemhunter.com/pablo-neruda/poems/
Here is a good one from another poet, César Vallejo, also one of the best of that century, called My Sweet Rita!
http://www.connectingsingles.com/poem18284/my-sweet-rita.htm
I don’t get the fascination with this guy. I read one of his books, and I thought the old goat wrote weird porn with just enough melancholy and brooding thrown in to be hailed as being great literature by leftist English professors.
RIP.