Platero and I by Juan Ramon Jimenez

[Diane]

Rating: 4 stars
Read: September 2016

This is a sweet book about a Spanish boy and his pet donkey, Platero, written by Nobel laureate Juan Ramon Jimenez. The story is told in vignettes. The language is beautiful, which is not surprising since the author is a poet. It works as both a children's book and as a book for adults. Children will enjoy the literal storyline, while adults will pick up on the rich use of symbolism.

[Tracy]

I liked this one so much- it was a sweet diversion from the heavier books on the list. A fuzzy donkey book, if you will.

[Diane]

Tracy wrote: "I liked this one so much- it was a sweet diversion from the heavier books on the list. A fuzzy donkey book, if you will."

I totally agree.

[Chinook]

2 stars

Maude. I tried, I really did. The language is very poetic and beautiful but I swear I’d read a paragraph and by the next one I’d lose all sense of what was going on. There’s no plot and not even many details about anyone but the donkey and the town. At the beginning I assumed the narrator was a very old and lonely man, with no one but his donkey and then it becomes clear he has a wife and kids. It also feels like a far older setting than it is - Mother Theresa gets mentioned and it turns out small Spanish villages in the fifties were just really not modern in any way yet.

The thing is that I read a children’s shortened version of this only a few months ago and yet none of the sections were at all familiar this time. It really was all in one eye and straight out of my memory apparently. I only finished it because it’s a 1001 book.

And then the damn donkey dies!

[Karen]

Platero and I reveals a life which has almost completely died out. The poet tells stories of, and too, his close companion, his donkey Platero.

There is nostalgia in the author's stories but this does not make the book sentimental. The life described here, of the people in the town of Moguer in Andalusia, is a simple traditional country one where the weather and the seasons are key guides, where a dog rescuing her puppies is worthy of a tale and the church and religious festivals are important cultural markers. But the author describes also the harshness of the life and its cruelties - death, poverty and animal cruelty.

The language is beautiful, and each chapter is a little vignette adding to the overall story. The book is poignant, sad, meaningful and I highly recommend it.

[Rosemary]

I loved this sweet book about a man and his donkey! It was published during World War I and describes a small Spanish town near the Andalusian coast from around the turn of the century (the main character says at the end that the children of the book are now grown up). There's a heavy dose of nostalgia as well as an idealised depiction of the Spanish countryside in all seasons, without shying away from the darker side such as deaths of children in those pre-antibiotic days.

I was lucky to have a lovely illustrated hardback edition from 1958. This is not when it was first published, but possibly when it was first translated into English. The Mother Theresa mentioned in another review is a local abbess of the town, not Mother Teresa of Kolkata.