Cayetano Brule, an unemployed Cuban in Valparaiso, escapes the tedium of a cocktail party one evening by disappearing into the library while the party is being held. He hopes to avoid chatting, but when an intruder enters and comments on the indignities of old age in vivid terms, Cayetano wonders aloud if the man might be a writer. When Cayetano turns around, he finds himself staring at Pablo Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, just two years before. Then Cayetano learns that Neruda has a mission for him, his first job as a private detective - to find a man Neruda has not seen for over thirty years, using skills he must learn through reading Simenon's Maigret novels and through on-the-job training.
Within the story of Cayetano's mission for Neruda, author Roberto Ampuero incorporates both the historical and contemporary history of Valparaiso and the political turmoil that roiled the country from the 1970s - 1990s. A ferocious earthquake in 1906 killed three thousand people and devastated the city, and in 1914 the Panama Canal opened and permanently ended Valparaiso's prosperity as a resupply stop for trips around Cape Horn. By 1971, President Salvador Allende, in the second year of his term, is the first Marxist ever to be elected president in open elections, and now, in 1973, Cayetano, his wife, and Neruda are ardent supporters, their politics representing an unusual point of view for most western readers.
As Cayetano tries to fulfill his task for Neruda, he travels throughout Mexico, Cuba, East Germany, and Bolivia, interviewing people from teachers to archivists. He is desperate to help Neruda, who is obviously dying of cancer. Dr. Angel Bracamonte, the man he seeks, was a researcher on the medicinal properties of native plants, but ironically, Neruda does not want to find Bracamonte for his medical skills. He has more personal reasons. As Cayetano travels to find the some of Bracamonte's heirs, he is often in danger, frequently followed, arrested, jailed, and beaten. He sometimes resorts to tactics he has learned from Simenon's Maigret, but Cayetano's biggest skill is one he shares with Neruda himself - he is a Latin lover extraordinaire.
Stylistically, the novel is sometimes baroque, with details presented through long phrases, clauses and parallels presented as series. Complex sentences, florid with adjectives and infinite details, give a sense of specificity to places and characters. Often humorous and full of ironies, Ampuero's conversational style makes Cayetano a charming narrator, even though his womanizing can get tiresome, and Neruda's many affairs begin to pall. The mystery itself moves in a straight narrative, but at times the reader may wish that Cayetano's search had been compressed so that it does not feel "thready" and lacking in impact. Digressions on Bertoldt Brecht, and the visit to his grave in East Germany, are connected thematically, but they are not essential and feel unnecessary. As Cayetano's search winds down and the tensions in Valparaiso and Santiago reach the breaking point, the various aspects of the novel come together in revolution, the effects of which devastate Chile for almost two decades, only to be rejected ultimately in favor of democracy. The Marxist trichotomy - thesis, antithesis, and synthesis - plays itself out here, for now....
