After a month at sea, they arrive on the day that the second world war breaks out in Europe. Neruda fills the Winnipeg, a cargo ship built for 20 seamen, with more than 2,000 Spaniards. As happened in real life, Neruda has persuaded Chile’s president to provide asylum for a number of Spanish refugees, defying rightwing opposition and the Catholic church. It’s thanks to the poet Pablo Neruda that they get there. “I have had to imagine very little,” she notes in her acknowledgments, and her research is evident on every page Acting out of fraternal loyalty rather than lust, Victor marries Roser so that she and his nephew can begin a new life with him in Chile. Separately, Victor, too, is imprisoned there, before escaping to track her down in Perpignan, where she and her baby son are sheltering with a Quaker family. Yet by the time the war is over, Roser is heavily pregnant and alone, and it will be a slower, infinitely more pragmatic – and more interesting – love that the novel ultimately celebrates.Īlong with some half a million other Spaniards fleeing Franco, Roser makes it to France, where she’s interned in the Argelès-sur-Mer concentration camp.
When his parents take in one of his father’s best piano students, Roser Bruguera, it’s Guillem that she falls in love with.
Lanky Victor is in many ways the opposite of his brother, Guillem, a handsome militiaman.
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