In the Library
Platero
Juan Ramón Jiménez, 1914
- Form
- Form Collection
- Reading time
- Reading time 50 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 66
- Length
- Length 12k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
About the book
Juan Ramón Jiménez never quite describes Platero: he talks to him. He calls him so soft you would think him stuffed with cotton, carrying no bones at all, and then he takes him walking every afternoon through the white streets of Moguer as if the donkey were the one friend worth confiding in. Chapter by chapter, page by unhurried page, that voice keeps circling back to him: his ears, his patience, the particular gray of his coat catching the Andalusian sun. Jiménez subtitled the whole book an Andalusian elegy, and it earns that word slowly. The afternoon walks that fill every early page eventually stop, and the last chapters go so quiet that you feel a loss you didn't know you had been bracing for. Few books make tenderness this plain, or make you grieve an animal you've never touched the way you'd grieve your own. Read it and you will want to go back and find him again on the first page, walking, alive, and yours.