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Luis Sepulveda. Mundo del fin del mundo. Barcelona. Tusquets. 1994. 145 pages.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez once suggested that in order to be recognized as a writer south of the Rio Grande, one needs first to be applauded in Europe and the United States. Luis Sepulveda, born in Ovalle, Chile, in 1949, illustrates the point. A precocious and prolific writer, a journalist, a militant ecologist, and an inexhaustible traveler (he was imprisoned under the Pinochet regime, and his exile took him to Norway, Spain, Equador, and the Amazon, among other locales), he remained totally unknown throughout his thirties and early forties, in spite of winning the Gabriela Mistral Poetry Prize in 1976 and the Romulo Gallegos Award several years later. His fate changed when Tusquets Editores, the Barcelona publishing house, acquired his 1989 novella Un viejo que leia novelas amor, a Hemingwayesque narrative about an old man inhabiting the Equadorian jungle whose only contact with...