Luis Sepúlveda, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, 1989

— When a gringo’s body is fished out of the water deep in the Amazon jungle, the local villagers realise the killer was an ocelot, enraged by the slaughter of her cubs. Only septuagenarian Antonio José Bolivar, who takes refuge from the world’s barbarities in reading love stories, has the skill needed to hunt her down. Native lore tells him it is sacrilege to slay her, but as one of the encroaching white race he knows she must die. In this haunting tale, exiled Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda powerfully dramatises the ravages of Western civilization and the threatened natural world’s retaliation.

A solitary, elderly man who lives alone at the edge of the Ecuadorian jungle becomes the one person who can track down and kill a dangerous ocelot, but he’d rather be left alone to read the tacky romance novels that he uses to teach himself to read. This has a tangible sense of time and place at the farthest edges of what’s left today of Spanish colonialism, and Sepúlveda’s lively, good humoured storytelling also comes with a subtle environmental message. He knows who he’s writing for, which is something that probably helped this debut novel win a total of eight European literary awards. A memorably good read.  PY

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