The old man who read love stories (Luis Sepulveda)

A man and his wife are forced to leave the mountains where they had been raised and move to the jungle. The jungle can be a terrible place to live in if you don’t know it, but it can be paradise if you learn how to make the most of what it has to offer. The old man who read love stories learnt how to do that from the Shuar Indians who at one stage let him live as one of their own. When the protagonist becomes an old man, all he wants to do is read love stories. These are supplied to him by the itinerant dentist who visits the village twice a year. His easy and lonely life changes when a gold digger is found dead on the margin of the river and he assures the authorities that the man was not killed by the Shuar, but by a jaguar. The fear that this animal may strike again forces a group of men, including him, to go on a hunt. After some misadventures and a few deaths, he discovers that the animal is avenging his dying mate. The old man then is forced into a game of cat and mouse and is victorious, he kills the animal with a fire arm, he is sickened by his own actions, by gold digger’s (that started it all in the first place by injuring the jaguar’s mate) and by white men in general and decides to go back to his love stories which used such sweet words, that sometimes he was able to almost forget human barbarity. - This book was dedicated to a man who fought and died to preserve the Amazon jungle: Chico Mendes.