From The Nature of Love

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsCarlos FranzCarlos Franz (1959, Geneva) is the author of four novels, including El desierto (2005; The Absent Sea, 2011), which addresses the issue of the disappeared in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship. The son of a Chilean diplomat and an actress, he grew up partly in Chile; in the past decade he has been a visiting fellow at Cambridge and King's College in England, and a Chilean cultural attaché in Madrid. He recently moved back to Chile. His current novel in progress, “La naturaleza del amor” (The Nature of Love), freely based in historical facts and from which the following excerpt is drawn, reinvents the meeting in Chile of Charles Darwin and German landscape painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, in 1834–35. Adventurous and romantic, Rugendas was the most important travel painter in nascent Latin America for almost twenty years. A present day narrator imagines the encounter as a tectonic clash between two opposite attitudes toward nature and human loveLeland H. ChambersLeland H. Chambers has translated novels by Susana Fortes, Juan Tovar, Carmen Boullosa, Julieta Campos, and Sergio Ramírez. His most recent translation is Franz's The Absent Sea