In his sweeping and exhaustively researched biography, Mark Eisner plumbs the man behind the legend, a task for which he’s well-suited. Eisner has spent the past two decades working on projects related to Neruda, including a documentary about the poet’s life and work. With such an extensive grounding, Eisner doesn’t so much document his subject as inhabit it ... Eisner earnestly tries to give his subject the benefit of the doubt, and there are times when he indulges gushing elegy, as when he writes that Neruda is 'one great body, still, in all its fullness, stretching across the world, to all its famous and hidden corners.' Such flattering assessments aside, one finishes The Poet’s Calling with a sense that it was better to read Pablo Neruda than to be around him.
Eisner’s prose, moreover, is on the whole, fairly pedestrian, except for a few unfortunate occasions when it strives, unwisely, for a kind of Nerudaesque poeticism ... And his criticisms of Neruda tend to be articulated using what are by now rote, clichéd terms that make them feel like empty, obligatory gestures ... Ultimately, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling is not as satisfying as one might have hoped. Still, Neruda’s life remains a source of fascination, and his work remains vital. Any book that is likely to help bring new generations of readers to it is to be valued for that reason alone.
The book bleeds purple in sections where Eisner’s admiration swells, and he rushes through the poet’s final decade: the 1971 Nobel Prize, a diagnosis of prostate cancer, Neruda’s sad, self-indulgent liaisons with his wife’s niece even as he was dying amid the Pinochet coup. But in meticulously dissecting Neruda’s poems and in mapping out the chronology of a rich if profoundly flawed life, Eisner gives us a definitive work. Neruda: The Poet’s Calling unfolds as a masterful weave of biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, a scrupulous portrait of a genius as vast and contradictory as the continent he loved.
Part of the value of Eisner’s biography is to situate a lastingly familiar and accessible body of work in its author’s exceptional experience of an irrecoverable recent past ... The decades since Neruda’s death in 1973...have seen the rout of international socialism as well as a radical shrinkage in the audience, or market share, for poetry. Neruda the earth’s universal poet hails from another planet ... 'Sube a nacer conmigo, hermano' is probably the most famous line of the poem ['The Heights of Macchu Picchu']: 'Rise to be born with me, brother.' History presents a choice, Neruda says, between dying alone each day or being born at last with our brethren. If the notion is embarrassing today, this does not seem entirely to our credit.
For more than 20 years, Eisner (The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, 2004) has steeped himself in the life and works of Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), resulting in a newly translated edition of his poetry, a documentary film, and this thoroughly researched, respectful, and evenhanded biography ... Perceptive readings of Neruda’s poems are contextualized by an absorbing historical, cultural, and political chronology.
Neruda scholar and translator Eisner (The Essential Neruda) provides a bracingly comprehensive and authoritative account of the “poetry, personality, and politics” of one of the 20th century’s most revered poets ... Meanwhile, the descriptions of places where Neruda lived and traveled are poetry themselves, such as Eisner’s description of how the young Neruda would 'watch the light blue ocean pulse its universal heartbeat.' This efficient and moving study should delight scholars and poets with its depth of detail and excellent translations, and may even draw new admirers who share Neruda’s belief that 'poetry is like bread; it should be shared... by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.'”
