The Old Man Who Read Love Stories

“Every Monday—he was obsessed with Mondays—they watched him raise the flag on a pole on the quay, until a storm swept the tattered cloth into the jungle, and with it the Monday ritual that nobody could care less about.”

The image of the flag being ripped to shreds by the storm (i.e., the unstoppable force of the jungle), like so much garbage, symbolizes the jungle’s strength over human notions of ownership. In the end, the jungle always wins. The image also demonstrates that the only person who cares about such rituals is the mayor, a puppet of the government.

“A grief-crazed Ocelot is more dangerous than twenty murderers put together.”

This quote asserts the ocelot’s lethal strength, but it also speaks to grief’s power to cause suffering and even death.

“When the old man first asked him to bring him books to read, making it plain he preferred suffering, hopeless loves and happy endings, the dentist felt he’d taken on a commitment that would be difficult to meet.”

This humorous moment highlights the complexity of love, which often results in suffering, hopelessness, or joy, but rarely all three at once. The sentence connotes the conflicts inherent in love, meaning love can be a state of conflict and impossibility, just as finding a love story containing those three conflicting attributes is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to locate.

Governments live on the sly bites they take out of their citizens, just as well we don’t get too worked up about them.”

“Sly bites,” a metaphor for the duplicity of authority, is the heart of this sentence that first seems like a warning but then becomes an exhortation to give up on worrying about it. The speaker pronounces the government’s sneakiness and how it slowly diminishes the lives of its citizens, but is too powerful an entity to stop, so one must forget about it and move on.

“Above all, they taught them how to live in harmony with the jungle.

This sentence follows of a long list of the ways in which the Shuar helped the dying settlers, such as teaching them how to hunt and fish and how to build a home that can withstand the ravages of the jungle. These are technical skills, but the Shuar’s final lesson, which the quote indicates is the most important one, is a spiritual one: They strive to teach white people to live in harmony with nature, which indicates their intelligent as well as their compassion for the settlers.

“The poor forgive everything but failure.”

The word “failure” here alludes to infertility, or the inability to procreate. But the sentence connotes a larger meaning inherent in the notion of failure that is spiritual in nature and rounded out by a sense of defeat, of downfall, of giving up: admitting one’s ruin is unforgivable.

“Yet in his helplessness he discovered he didn’t know the jungle well enough to hate it.”

This quote is a powerful metaphor about hatred and love, tolerance and acceptance. In order to hate, or to love, one must know the subject of one’s confusion. Antonio realizes he must wait to cast aspersions and judgments over a thing he doesn’t yet understand.

“However much he tried to revive his old feeling of hatred, he couldn’t help loving that world, and then the hatred faded as he was seduced by those vast expanses without frontier or owner.”

When Antonio learns about the jungle and the ways of its native communities, he can no longer summon the antipathy he felt when blaming the jungle for killing his wife. He comes to love the lack of governance by other humans, the lack of ownership and boundary; he prizes the notion that the land is the ultimate sovereign figure, one that doesn’t restrict or exhibit cruelty as long as it is respected and honored.

“In the dream that followed he saw himself as an inseparable part of those perpetually changing places…”

After the Shuar trust Antonio enough to give him his first taste of natema, a ceremonial hallucinogen, he has his first true spiritual experience. He sees himself as part of something that is not static, something that moves and transforms for eternity.

“In short he was like them, and yet was not one of them.”

This quote is repeated throughout the novel, which signals its importance. Antonio must always remember that while the Shuar accept him and recognize his ability to love and respect the jungle and their community, blood lines will always keep him separate. He cannot be of their lineage because his blood is not their blood; rather, it is the blood of the colonizer. Blood is a reminder that though the Shuar love him, they can never fully trust him or accept him as one of their own.

“While he lived with the Shuar, he had no need of love stories to know love.”

Antonio discovers his true self through his friendship with the Shuar. He finds his courage, his strength, and his goodness. Among the Shuar, he has no need for fantasy in the form of love stories because his present reality is fulfilling all his needs. He loves the land, its animals, and his friends, and they return his love in kind.

“Nobody can tie down a thunderbolt and nobody can take for his own rapture of the other at the moment of abandon.”

This statement is about selfishness and ego. The most powerful thing on earth—to the Shuar, this is the land—can never be tamed, not even through death or violence. It is bigger than the people who attempt to steal or domesticate it, and it will always win in the end. But this quote is also a warning about stealing pleasure, such as gold, sex, liquor, money, or the identity of another human. It is a parable that mimics Western notions of sin and the power of a supreme being like God.

“More settlers came drawn by the promise of a future in cattle and timber. They also brought alcohol uncontrolled by ritual, and with it the degeneration of the weakest. And, above all, the plague of gold prospectors grew, unscrupulous individuals who came from every side with a single aim of making a quick fortune.”

The rape and pillage of the land is bad enough, this quote reveals, but worse than that is the disregard that comes along with it. Liquor that flows freely, and is not contained by ritual, will destroy people. In other words, without respect for and boundaries around such potentially destructive things, they will destroy. Money and the pursuit of wealth will always lead to corruption.

“The Shuar pushed his canoe out on the current, then erased his footprints.”

After Antonio is exiled from the tribe, the Shuar metaphorically wipe his existence off their land by brushing away any physical trace of him. This metaphor signals complete erasure, without exception. Antonio is never to return, and to the Shuar he no longer exists.

“Both the settlers and the gold prospectors made all kinds of stupid mistakes in the jungle. They pillaged it unmercifully, so that some animals turned really hostile.”

Without boundaries, knowledge, and the patience to learn about animals and their place in the ecological structure of life, mistakes will be made. However, willful damage and the intentional destruction of life will have consequences—and those who are intentionally harmed will have their revenge.

“It was the most important discovery of his whole life. He could read. He possessed the deadly antidote to the poison of old age. He could read.”

As an old man, Antonio has lost everything, with his heart repeatedly broken into pieces over time. So, when he realizes he knows how to read, he is relieved to have found a way to survive through his imagination. The quote applauds the virtues of reading and the power of story to change lives.

“He spent the whole of the rainy season brooding on his unhappy plight as a frustrated reader, and for the first time in his life knew what it was to be pursued by the beast of solitude.”

This is Antonio’s darkest moment. There is nothing to give him hope. He has reached a bottom and realizes the stark and dangerous state that loneliness can bring. But all most face and conquer such moments if they are to take action and improve their lives. Shortly after this, Antonio devises his method for getting books, which stems from being in the nadir of his despair.

“The characters suffered and mingled love and pain so beautifully that his magnifying glass was awash with tears.”

One of Antonio’s prized possessions is his magnifying glass, a symbol of widening the view of one’s ideas and knowledge. This symbol represents that the wisdom Antonio has gained, at great cost to himself, has expanded his worldview and allowed him the opportunity to use his insight. His tears are tears of gratitude for this new gift that came in the aftermath of major loss—the ability to understand and “see” the world from a larger perspective, as well as having the luxury of finding something to sustain him in his dying years.

“He’d often heard it said that wisdom comes with age, and he waited, trusting that this wisdom would give him what he most wanted: the ability to guide his memories, and not fall in the traps they often set for him.”

The key component of this quote is the notion of trusting oneself and what one has learned to avoid repeating the same mistakes. That Antonio’s memories are depicted as “traps” indicates their power over him, and when he “falls” into them, he loses his ability to live his life as it is. The irony of this quote is that the next thing to follow in the book is Antonio sinking into his memories. The quote instructs the reader and warns that living in the past is not living in the moment, and that wisdom comes not with age but with action and responsibility.

“As the Shuar say: by day it’s man and jungle, by night man is jungle.”

The jungle is wild, but humans and the jungle know their place during daylight. When it grows dark, however, humans can become tangled, ruthless, and deadly, like the jungle. It’s important to note that day and night symbolize more than darkness and light—they symbolize good and evil. Thus, this quote is a warning about humanity’s capacity to be unscrupulous, hateful, and violent when uninformed.

“That’s what it’s like here, in case you hadn’t noticed. The jungle gets to us. If we haven’t got a definite goal to aim for, we just go around in circles.”

This unnamed speaker, a member of the search party, is saying that the jungle is a metaphor for the human condition. It must be tamed by meaning and wisdom, or else it will turn and become something else, something dangerous.

“Perhaps his life among the Shuar enabled him to see those deaths as an act of justice. A cruel but inescapable eye for an eye. The gringo had murdered her cubs and perhaps her mate.”

Here Antonio refers to Exodus 21:23-25, a biblical passage regarding revenge. Antonio recalls his Catholic upbringing to explain why death is sometimes justice, especially when justice through the law—in this case the censure of the profiteers and their ignorance—isn’t possible.

“The inhabitants of El Idilio often talk about you as the Hunter, and you tell them it’s not true, because hunters kill to conquer the fear that’s driving them mad and rotting their guts.”

This characterization of Antonio is meant as praise for his wisdom about hunting. When one hunts for pleasure, prize, and personal gain, it’s a sign of fear. Fear is the evilest of all motivators because it leads to disregard for life and liberty. Here, Antonio is depicted as a man with morals. He is not driven by fear. He hunts only when hungry and only when necessary. In this way he shows his gratitude to the animals for their gift of sustenance, unlike the conqueror, who is driven only by fear and must continually steal and take to keep the semblance of sanity.