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Writer Isabel Allende asked today to the “Chilean feminists” not to “stay only with” what Chilean poet and Nobel Prize for Literature Pablo Neruda did, who in one of his memoirs confessed to having raped a woman. Otherwise, Allende claims that “no one will be spared.”
This is what Allende said during a virtual press conference she gave yesterday to present her latest novel, which has been published simultaneously in Spanish and English in the United States, Latin America and Spain.
Neruda was in life a declared communist, something that could have conditioned the lack of a forceful rejection by the writer, who is a relative of the late former Chilean socialist leader, Salvador Allende.
In this sense, the writer, who is about to turn 80, has referred to the controversy in her homeland Chile over the revelation of a rape told by Pablo Neruda in “Confieso que he vivido” (I confess that I have lived.)
“Neruda confesses that he raped a woman and Chilean feminists want to eliminate Neruda, and one thing is the flawed man, who we are all flawed, and another is the work. If in the case of an artist like Neruda we are going to stay with what he did, let’s review his private life, but let’s not eliminate everything, because otherwise no one will be spared,” she said.
