Pablo Neruda Sonnets Novels & Stories

The owner, a man in his seventies with reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, looked up from behind the counter and nodded at us. We spent an hour there. That was the part I hadn't expected — that Caleb would actually browse, would pull things off shelves and read the back covers, would hold up a battered copy of a Neruda collection and say, "Did you know his real name was Ricardo Neftalí Reyes Basoalto? He changed it so his father wouldn't know he was writing poetry." "His father disapproved?" I asked, and Caleb's mouth curved. "His father thought poetry was a waste of time for a man." He put it back. "He wrote twenty-something books anyway."

"If life is a hundred years, we have already walked through one-third of it. The remaining two-thirds, I hope you can give me a chance to accompany you and continue with you." "Hannah, I don't know how I fell in love with you, nor when or where. My love is straightforward, neither complicated nor proud. I love you because I don't know what other choice I have besides loving you. Will you marry me?" This is "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" by Pablo Neruda. Kendall copied this passage when she confessed her feelings. Now he knelt on one knee in front of her, reading it out loud, as if time and space had intertwined, taking them back to that winter fifteen years ago.