Part biography part travelogue this is an interesting book in that it consists of notes that were taken at various times but which didn’t make it into a book, and Sepúlveda didn’t really know what to do with for a long time.

These notes, which I can’t think what to call, lay about on a shelf somewhere gathering dust. From time to time, looking for old photos or documents, I would come across them, and I confess that I read them with a mixture of tenderness and pride, because in these scribbled, or clumsily typed pages I had made an attempt to come to terms with two themes of capital importance, aptly defined by the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar: understanding what it means to be human what it means to be an artist.

The book starts with memories of being a boy being taken round town by his grandfather, Sepúlveda was born in 1949 so this would be the mid to late 1950’s in Chile, being loaded up with soft drinks and ice-cream until he was desperate to empty his bladder and then taken to whatever church his grandfather had picked as that weeks target and made to urinate on the church door. This would of course be met with approbation by the priest of the church but his grandfather would defend his right to pee where he needed to and would get satisfaction from the insult to the church thus engendered. Eventually at the age of eleven he simply refused to do his grandfathers bidding and insisted on going to a proper toilet. Expecting to be punished for refusing to so his grandfathers bidding he is relieved, in more ways than one, to simply be taken to a bar and after finishing is given a book to read (one of the classics of social realism – Nikolay Ostrovsky’s How the Steel was Tempered) and made to promise to go on a journey inspired by the book and also to his grandfather’s birthplace of Martos in Spain.

After the comic start it was quite a shock to read the next chapter which deals with his time as a political prisoner in Chile as inspired by Ostrovsky he had joined the Young Communists so under the right wing dictatorship of General Pinochet he was regarded as a dangerous radical. The descriptions of the appalling conditions and the allusions to the electrical torture endured including the doctor who could tell how much electricity had been imposed when the victims were returned to the prison and could therefore judge what treatment each prisoner needed to recover are graphic yet needed to be told and I can see why Sepúlveda couldn’t think of what to do with his notes about these three years of his life.

After this the book becomes more of the travel book implied by it’s title with trips out of Chile and into various other South American countries with greater or lesser success in getting to his aimed for destination and the people he met on the way. Including a trip to Patagonia when he was finally allowed back into his home country after years of exile which was originally intended to have been with the British writer and explorer Bruce Chatwin, who had sadly died young and before Sepúlveda could go to Patagonia. This is one of the times the notes had actually been the basis of a book ‘Patagonia Express’ first published in 1995 in Spanish and then in 2004 in English translation. After reading this book I feel the need to get hold of this work and see what it ultimately became. There is a lot more travel writing beyond this trip in the book and I greatly enjoyed following Sepúlveda around the continent.

The penultimate chapter takes Sepúlveda to Spain and a fulfilment of a promise to his grandfather right at the start to visit Martos where he starts searching for anything his grandfather had told him about the place especially a drinking establishment called Hunter’s Bar. He goes to the pub in the central square to make enquiries but the landlord doesn’t recognise the name however older patrons point out that the bar he is in was known decades ago as Hunter’s Bar so he had inadvertently discovered where he was looking for within minutes of arrival. This then leads to him telling the tales as to why he was there only for the patrons to take him en masse to the local church to consult the priest for birth records. There they find not only his grandfather but also his grandfather’s brother who is still alive in the town. Taken to the man’s house he eventually overcomes his nervousness and we go full circle as he introduces himself to his great uncle, Don Angel.

It’s a good read, difficult at times with the description of his time in prison but uplifting so many times after this dark period and I’m glad I’ve read it. It is another of the short lived Lonely Planet Journeys series which as I’ve explained before I bought a lot of when it was clear the series was being discontinued and am only now sitting down to read.