The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) embodies the upheavals of the 20th century like few others. Inevitably, these are also inscribed in his work. To approach Neruda, Hans Christoph Buch makes several attempts: from the early poems inspired by Rimbaud and Verlaine, through the surreal delirium of his time on Earth, triggered by the culture shock of his role as consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Indonesia; and further from the Spanish Civil War, the death of his friend Federico García Lorca, his entry into the Communist Party in 1945, to the adventurous escape via Buenos Aires to Paris, where the leftist intelligentsia celebrated him as a martyr, and to his hymns to Stalin. Pablo Neruda was all at once a bourgeois bon vivant who prided himself on his closeness to peasants and workers, a figure moving between Paris, Beijing, Mexico, and.