Highly recommended. I dare you to tell me you did not answer at least one of the above questions automatically! Grow Your Club: Looking to connect with readers outside your personal circle? Open your club to the public and find new members in your hometown or across the globe. In contrast to the first two questions, the subject of the third question is an artificial object: a car. But it is also personified. It’s a criminal automobile, a thief—but with regrets. The speaker is concerned not so much with the car itself, which sounds pretty interesting. (What does it steal? Gasoline?). No, the poem is concerned with who has sympathy for the car. The speaker sees the car with animist eyes, as a living being, and wonders who else does too. Who lends an ear as a friend, or absolution as a priest? The question isn’t about whether something is real or not—unlike in the others, here the automobile's reality is taken for granted—but about community and imagination. Because the speaker has implied sympathy for the car, we are made to wonder if the car is doing something against its will. And since cars usually do the bidding of humans, it may be a victim of human desire. Perhaps it regrets stealing resources from the earth. It takes a poetic imagination to grant the respect of personification to a car, to see the complex ethical relationships that we ignore in ordinary thought.

If I wanted to attempt to answer questions to make me wonder how I've lived my life and how I treat people, would that make me a masochist? If I am a masochist, how do I effectively balance that with my sadism? Compare this book to other books you have read by the same author, or other books you have read covering the same or similar themes. How are they the same or different? Who was your favorite character? What character did you identify with the most? Were there any characters that you disliked? Why? What a majestic way to end his last collection of the verses... And what a suitable poem for the picture outside my window at the moment...

About the Translator

Did any part of this book strike a particular emotion in you? Which part and what emotion did the book make you feel?

I was first introduced to this book in the late 80s & have pulled it out many times throughout the years - both to get to know someone better & to revisit the questions myself as I mature. Some are researchable questions in a scientific sense: If the rivers are all freshwater, how does the sea get its salt?Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician.