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The Book of Questions

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There are some poems one must simply take in visually and revel in the imagery they invoke discarding their literariness. But then you've read this far so I can't exactly deprive you, right? I just opened this book (for the last time) to pgs 162 an 163:

In the second question, the speaker asks “why”; this could be either a direct question to the reader, or a rhetorical question. As in the first stanza, the subject is botanical (here, trees), and personified. The question about the rose wondered if she was revealing all, or hiding something. This question about the trees claims to know what they are doing—concealing—but asks: why? The speaker sees “splendor” in tree roots. The Spanish word, from which this is translated, is very similar: “esplendor.” It comes from the Latin word, meaning “shine, be bright.” So, there a is paradox in the language of this question: roots grow underground, yet the speaker sees them as bright and shiny, which are attributes of light. Trees bring in light through their leaves, converting it along with water into energy. So in a way, light is stored underground in the roots of trees. Trees conceal their roots because they have to. If they are uprooted, they can’t live. Some few of the questions I did find interesting and thought provoking. The majority however I found...well, pointless even silly. I see many don't agree with me but I looked at questions that made strange assumptions or gave an incomplete premise, or an absurd premise and mostly shook my head. If you found a book of more than 217 hypothetical questions and their follow-ups and could use it as an excuse to achieve a deeper understanding of yourself or someone else, would you? Some of the problems aren’t all that bad, but they reveal a lot about you I would think. Take Question 001 for example. It goes like this: Neruda became known as a poet when he was 10 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems, such as the ones in his collection: Twenty Love Poems, and a Song of Despair (1924). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

About the Author

During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic posts and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. Keep your book club discussion questions at your fingertips with our book club questions pdf and make it easy for you to plan and lead insightful discussions about the books you read. With the printable book club questions readily available, you can focus on fostering meaningful conversations with your book club members, instead of worrying about coming up with questions on the spot. Neruda was accomplished in a variety of styles, ranging from erotically charged love poems like his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a controversial award because of his political activism. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language."

When Neruda died in 1973, The Book of Questions was one of eight unpublished poetry manuscripts that lay on his desk. In it, Neruda achieves a deeper vulnerability and vision than in his earlier work-and this unique book is a testament to everything that made Neruda an artist. Kept this on the dinner table to throw out and discuss with the fam a few times, but the questions are kind of lame and we soon lost interest. Let it sit for a month or so and thought maybe I'd post a few questions from it here in this review and let folks answer in the comments... Then I skimmed and read some more and thought better of it.

More by this poet

Grow Your Club: Looking to connect with readers outside your personal circle? Open your club to the public and find new members in your hometown or across the globe. Have you stopped beating your wife? Follow-up questions: Have you quit smoking yet? Do I look fat in this? Do you think she's pretty? How thought-provoking did you find the book? Did the book change your opinion about anything, or did you learn something new from it? If so, what? Compare this book to other books you have read by the same author, or other books you have read covering the same or similar themes. How are they the same or different? Was there any part of the plot or aspects of the characters that frustrated or upset you? If so, why?

When Neruda died in 1973, The Book of Questions was one of eight unpublished poetry manuscripts that lay on his desk. In it, Neruda achieves a deeper vulnerability and vision than in his earlier work; this unique book is a testament to everything that made Neruda an artist. The subject of the question is a rose, a common symbol of beauty in poetry. The poem personifies the rose, imagining her as a woman. Then we are to consider the rose’s appearance: is she naked or wearing a dress? This is a question about beauty and appearances. If the rose is naked, she is concealing nothing. Her beauty is intrinsic to her being, and she simply is, without mystery. What if she is wearing a “dress”? It would have to be her “only” dress, as roses don’t change their petals to suit different occasions. If she is wearing a dress, the implication is that she is hiding something under the surface—that reality is concealed. This could also be a question about human perception. What do we see when we see a rose? Do we see the real rose "itself," or only the appearance of the rose? Is the beauty of the rose intrinsic to it, or something that we humans create? In this seemingly simple question, the poem poses one of the most profound questions about the nature of reality and beauty, placing it in the realm of philosophy, of metaphysics and aesthetics. It may also be an indication that Neruda read the Critique of Judgment by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, which considers the rose as a subject to explore human judgment of beauty. Surrealism/magical realism? Unanswerable, paradoxical, the logic of a child’s ever-expanding universe of curiosity, which continues in those who remain artists and writers and scientists and children forever. What a majestic way to end his last collection of the verses... And what a suitable poem for the picture outside my window at the moment...Is there room for a few thorns? they asked the rosebush. What news bursts forth from the leaves of those first days of spring? In contrast to the first two questions, the subject of the third question is an artificial object: a car. But it is also personified. It’s a criminal automobile, a thief—but with regrets. The speaker is concerned not so much with the car itself, which sounds pretty interesting. (What does it steal? Gasoline?). No, the poem is concerned with who has sympathy for the car. The speaker sees the car with animist eyes, as a living being, and wonders who else does too. Who lends an ear as a friend, or absolution as a priest? The question isn’t about whether something is real or not—unlike in the others, here the automobile's reality is taken for granted—but about community and imagination. Because the speaker has implied sympathy for the car, we are made to wonder if the car is doing something against its will. And since cars usually do the bidding of humans, it may be a victim of human desire. Perhaps it regrets stealing resources from the earth. It takes a poetic imagination to grant the respect of personification to a car, to see the complex ethical relationships that we ignore in ordinary thought. William O’Daly’s fine translations of the Nobel winner Pablo Neruda’s posthumous books… are gently astonishing, the way good poetry should be.” — Crossroads There is an ironic reversal of expectation in this: Many poems have been written to praise the beauty of fruit and flowers, but roots are often overlooked as merely functional. What does it mean to see the splendor of roots? It can be seen as a political metaphor about the economic base upon which the superstructure is built. These are Marxist terms, relevant to analyzing Neruda’s poetry because he was an active member of the Communist Party. So, this short poem can be seen as a nod to the masses who do the work to keep society alive, but whose labor is concealed by ideology. Alternatively, this could be read a spiritual metaphor, or a reworking or reversal of the famous Dylan Thomas poem that begins “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/Is my destroyer.” Roots can also refer to ancestry, so it could also be read as a metaphor for an improper shame towards one’s family history.

Would it disturb you much if, upon your death, your body were simply thrown into the woods and left to rot? Why?" I've known Pablo Neruda since my teenage years when his romantic love poems kept me awake at night. But this set of poems presented as questions touch me even deeper. It is just a statement that a human being do not stop to answer questions even after long long life.. It is published posthumously, and he died in a year i was born. So it is like an invisible thread between the times for me. Eternity... Pablo Neruda is one of the world's most popular and famous poets, and in The Book of Questions, Neruda refuses to be corralled by the rational mind. Composed of 316 unanswerable questions, these poems integrate the wonder of a child with the experiences of an adult. By turns Orphic, comic, surreal, and poignant, Neruda's questions lead the reader beyond reason into the realms of intuition and pure imagination. Who was your favorite character? What character did you identify with the most? Were there any characters that you disliked? Why?

Q#163: Would you get a tattoo the size of a dinner plate if you knew it would somehow save the lives of a busload of innocent tourists who'd otherwise die? If so, what tattoo design and location would you select? Did you highlight or bookmark any passages from the book? Did you have a favorite quote or quotes? If so, share which and why? Given two equally terrifying alternatives as presented in several of these questions, which one would you choose and how would you live with the consequences? Don't you find your answer as interesting as I do?

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