The late Jorge Edwards, one of the last witnesses of a vibrant era in 20th century Spanish-language literature, died in Madrid at ninety-one. He slipped away quietly after telling his final visitors that a nap awaited him. It was a Friday afternoon on Núñez de Balboa Street, a place where he had spent his last years among friends, bookstores, and bars, even as the city buzzed around him.
The Peruvian writer Jorge Eduardo Benavides, who had recently been with him, recalls Edwards as half-asleep, half-hopeful, as if he still believed his advice and company would be welcome to anyone who sought him out for a drink or a meal. And then, he passed. An era closes that might not be recoverable in any future moment without memory to keep it alive.
A vast memory capacity accompanied him. His books endure, many dedicated to the memory of others, including relatives and, notably, the memory of Pablo Neruda, whom Edwards had known since childhood and who had recently passed away. Neruda, a towering figure, was more than a poet; he was a global icon of poetry and a symbol of contemporary devotion.
Jorge Edwards: “I’ve been more loyal to literature than to women”
In the realm of memory, Edwards faced the Cuban revolution in candid, first-person terms—one of Latin America’s most promising yet sorrowful chapters. He traveled there as the business manager for the Salvador Allende government, hoping to discover a world truly renewed. But that hope was soon cut short by the realities of politics and power.
The revolution proved to be a tangle of bureaucracies and orders, not the seamless upheaval many imagined. He described himself as a persona non grata, a man grateful for his past yet disillusioned about the future of those early revolutionary dreams. The revolution, he suggested, should be remembered in small letters because it quickly became memory itself.
This disillusionment shaped that book, and in turn it colored the literary world’s relationship with the author. Persona non grata became a vital witness testimony of a man who, though not consumed by melancholy, was haunted by the urge to reinvent himself as a writer and thinker amid warnings of betrayal that had gone unnoticed. Yet he never lost his humor or his memory. Perhaps that resilience kept him alive to the end, when friends, including Jorge Eduardo Benavides, gathered to hear unpublished chapters of his long life and the friendships that sustained him.
Edwards moved in a circle of global readers and writers, from India to the Americas. He welcomed visits at homes, joined literary excursions, and spent years near Carlos Barral, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Marsé, and Carmen Balcells. This phase of his life never faded into obscure corners; even as he aged, his memory and wit kept him deeply connected to the world of ideas. His memoir and literary portraits—like the substantial biography that centers on his uncle Joaquín Edwards—became part of a larger, endlessly evolving narrative. And through it all, Jorge Edwards remained modest, never self-indulgent, never egocentric.
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In later years, Edwards spoke of literature not as a field of distant grandeur but as a lived conversation with the past. He was a quiet speaker who seemed to know more than he said, as if every sentence were a paragraph in a bigger work being written in real time. In the final months of a life tightly bound to destiny, he spoke of himself and his circle as a living archive, a group of people who had touched borders and cities around the world.
I recall the last interview in which the possibility of Pablo Neruda’s poisoning came up. Edwards described the surroundings with precise detail, naming places, people, and moments with a recall that felt almost prophetic, as if the present memory could outlive the moment itself. Benavides joined that conversation, and they both sensed that the discussion of Neruda’s fate was not merely a rumor but a lens on history itself. Even then, Edwards invited us to share a meal, because conversation mattered to him more than anything—though literature remained the central reason for his prestige.
In another conversation, attended by the Asturian professor Eduardo San José, he considered the afterlife with unusual seriousness while still keeping a playful tone about aging. He was ninety-two, dressed and ready for lunch, eager to keep talking with San José about stories that could one day be published as both a novelty and a tribute to the great storyteller he continued to be.
Before a final, quiet visit, Edwards asked a friend, “Won’t you interview me again?” The thought of having a million friends around him on another day brought a glow to his face. He understood the complexities of Cuba and other difficult chapters, yet he remained a good man who could laughingly tease himself about his own fame. The most remarkable part of his life, in the end, was not the acclaim but the genuine joy he found in living and sharing with others.
In Geneva, a decade earlier, when he had just finished a post as Chilean ambassador in Paris, he told Benavides that he wanted to move to Madrid and grow old there. He was eighty, and that desire—bold and simple—speaks to the vitality he carried to the last. A friend, the Peruvian writer Fernando Iwasaki, described him as a Chilean Montaigne: a memoirist, a portraitist of cities, and a steadfast historian of the many places he loved. And the everyday question remained: when would there be lunch again? Edwards lived to share those moments with others. He never surrendered his joy for living, and those who knew him say his spirit endures in the pages he left behind.
He always asked, with a smile, when the next meal would be. That was his way of staying connected to the world. He lived to recount, and he did so with a fearless honesty that remains a lasting testament to a life spent in pursuit of truth, friendship, and the unyielding pleasure of a good conversation.