FICTION

THE OLD MAN WHO READ LOVE STORIES by Luis Sepulveda, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush (Harcourt Brace: $14.95; 144 pp.) The dentist comes upriver twice a year to pull the natives’ teeth. On one visit, the Old Man tallies extractions. “Do you always keep count?” asks the dentist. “That’s what friends are for,” says the Old Man. He knows things: How to catch monkeys with hollow coconuts, how to keep piranhas at bay by rubbing his body with sap, how to milk snake venom to sell to the labs. He knows, too, that the native wife of the slimy village mayor will kill him: “She’s piling up hatred but hasn’t got enough yet. These things take time.” Some Old Man, this Old Man. Shrewder, and funnier, than Hemingway’s version; more accommodating than Ahab. Like the others, uncommonly courageous; unlike them, unremittingly endearing.

This Old Man has come down from the highlands of Ecuador, responding to hollow promises of government help in settling the jungle state of Amazonia. He brings his bride to the haphazard, virgin village called El Idilio. Nothing grows on their “farm.” His bride dies. The Old Man melts into the jungle, where he is adopted by a tribe of eccentric hunters who send him off periodically, just for the sheer joy of welcoming him back.

He is wryly magnificent, this Old Man, this memorable creation of Luis Sepulveda, but he has a vice: He reads. Word by word, sometimes letter by letter, but he reads, and it is his great comfort there in the jungle, “the antidote to the deadly poison of old age.” The dentist brings him two books every six months. The Old Man wants stories of “suffering, hopeless loves and happy endings.” The dentist gets them from a conscientious black whore, who “alternated her duties as female companion with those of literary critic.”

There is a plot, pitting the brave Old Man against a bereft, marauding ocelot, but mostly there are the beloved books, sentence by sentence, word by word, and the Old Man. You will love him.