Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > The Old Man Who Read Love Stories

”On March 1, 2020, after returning from a conference in Portugal, Luis Sepúlveda was confirmed as the first man in the Asturias region of Spain to be infected by COVID-19. By March 11, it was reported that Sepúlveda was in critical condition, that he was in an induced coma with assisted breathing due to multiple organ failure in an Oviedo hospital.He died on April 16 due to the virus.”--Wikipedia

This novel won the Tigre Juan Award in 1988. It was his first novel.

”He could read!

It was the most important discovery of his whole life. He could read. He possessed the antidote to the deadly poison of old age. He could read. But he had nothing to read.”

Antonio Jose Bolivar Proano has lived in the jungle of Ecuador for nearly forty years. He once lived with the Shuar natives, but tragic circumstances required him to leave his adopted tribe and settle with his fellow whites in the small village of El Idilio. He was once a great hunter, but now he has become old and enjoys nothing more than losing himself in the pain and anguish of doomed love stories. A dentist who shows up twice a year to extract teeth from the villagers brings him two new books. The dentist knows a hooker who has the exact same taste in books as Bolivar.

Bolivar would be quite content to lead his simple life and while away the hours of his days enthralled by the passions of fictional people, but a man is killed by a female ocelot after he killed her cubs and wounded her mate. Bolivar is forced to join the hunt for the female by the fat, wife-beating mayor, whom everyone calls the Slimy Toad behind his back. ”His wife will kill him. She’s piling up hatred but hasn’t got enough yet. These things take time.”

These things take time. I wonder how many wives right now are contemplating creative ways to murder their husbands after being quarantined with them for several weeks. :-) Let’s hope these are only fantasies and that the piling up of unhappiness merely leads to divorce, not murder most foul.

Bolivar finds what is left of a settler and a dead American, killed by the grief-stricken ocelot. The jungle is rather tidy with debris. ”The American was lying a few yards further on. The ants had done a magnificent job, leaving their bones as smooth as plaster. The American’s skeleton was receiving the last attention of the ants. They were carrying away his straw-colored hair strand by strand, like tiny women woodcutters felling coppery trees, to strengthen the entrance tunnel to their anthill.”

The ocelot has a taste for blood now, the blood of man, and she won’t stop killing them until her last breath.

Bolivar doesn’t want to be the one, but he knows he has to be the one. He soon finds himself in a desperate struggle to kill an animal he sympathizes with before she manages to kill him. I keep thinking about The Old Man and the Sea, as one man battles the forces of nature. This is considered an ecological novel and certainly shines a light on the negative impact of the West on those regions of the world that were existing in balanced harmony before the trudge of their big feet, the jangle of their equipment, their loud voices, their arrogance, their pathological need to hunt, and their fascination in gazing upon primitive cultures (reminding me of those who search out poverty porn) turn a jungle into chaos.

I really love the sweet, subtle power of this novel. The resistance of a culture to technology and the metal monsters of guns and machines. The respect that the Shuar people show the jungle and the wonder they feel as they encounter mystical elements that seemingly defy science. I love thinking about this leather-skinned, old man pondering the mysteries of love as he listens to the river and turns the pages of a book.

There is a movie based on the book, starring Richard Dreyfuss, that was released in 2001. I’ve not been able to track down a copy to watch, but certainly intend to when I finally find a way.

Sepulveda’s life reads like a novel, not a love story, but one fraught with constant danger. He was arrested twice in his home country of Chile and tortured by the General Augusto Pinochet regime. He was an ardent supporter of the rights of people. He eventually was released after pressure by Amnesty International and chose to live in Germany because of his great love for the literature of that country. If you get a chance, do read about his life on Wikipedia. He was certainly a man who used the power of his pen to try and expose the abuses of those in power. It is unfortunate that it took a news story about his death appearing on my cell phone for me to be motivated to finally read one of his books.

This is a slender, but powerful book. You won’t regret spending an afternoon with Bolivar and his struggle with his conscience as he tracks down a cat who has every right to be vengeful.

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