Antonio Skármeta: The Dancer and the Thief

Joan Frank reviews Antonio Skármeta's The Dancer and the Thief.

"The Dancer and the Thief" is Skármeta's valentine for Chile's exhausted human capital, the lost, the loose, the marginalized. A shrewd awareness is at work here, one that does not preclude joy, but owes much to the bittersweet comprehensions of the tango. "Suicide was an undignified act," Gray muses, walking along the Mapocho. One cool nod is given to Chileans with money: "On Friday afternoons, the wealthy who own beach houses leave for the coast." Everyone else in this story is poor, hungry and cold; when food appears, it's embraced like a lover.

"[H]e knew he could devour at least two, maybe three, of those completos 'with everything' [...] hot dogs, nestled in fluted rolls [...] piled high with a leaning tower of mashed avocado, chopped tomatoes, a thin, long line of El Copihue hot sauce, a pile of pickled cabbage - German-style - and crowned with a feverish delight of mayonnaise and mustard. These sandwiches begged to be downed in two bites that left the front of your shirt covered with the unstable ingredients and your face smeared all the way up to your eyebrows with a voluptuous carnival of flavors."

"A voluptuous carnival of flavors" summarizes Skármeta's enterprise, with its now breathless, now sardonic sensibility; its deft jabs at bureaucracy and academic rigidity; impassioned invocations of art and artists; jubilant sex and sexuality. And its funny, solemn pronouncements: "I may be a thief, but I'm not a pimp," Gray sniffs. Shaping a fond, brave, modern fable from authentic, anguished history, Skármeta has cooked up a completo.

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Chilean Literature

Antonio Skarmeta: The Dancer and the Thief

Jonathan Yardley reviews Antonio Skármeta's The Dancer and the Thief.

Obviously the outcomes of both courtships must be left for the reader to discover, but The Dancer and the Thief is much more than an agreeable caper. Though Skarmeta scarcely ranks at the very top of Latin America's remarkably distinguished and varied literary elite, he is a serious writer to whom the death and rebirth of democracy in his native Chile is an endlessly compelling subject. Now in his late 60s, Sk¿rmeta fled Chile more than three decades ago as Pinochet clamped down -- he had practiced journalism and taught literature at the University of Chile -- and though he has lived in Germany on and off since 1975, his burning interest and literary preoccupation remain his home country.

His attitude toward it, as toward its capital of Santiago, is a mixture of exasperation and love. When Vergara Gray tells his son about a forebear who invented the telephone but lost the U.S. patent to Alexander Graham Bell, the boy replies: "You are so Chilean. Instead of commemorating victories, you celebrate defeats. Like our national hero, Arturo Prat: everybody remembers him with great affection because he lost the naval battle of Iquique against the Peruvians." Though in fairness Skarmeta really ought to acknowledge that Peru itself honors as "heroes" many leaders who lost battles in the same War of the Pacific, it is true that the self-deprecatory streak runs strong in Chile. It is scarcely anything to be ashamed of.

Skarmeta also is proud of Chile for rising above Pinochet and establishing what now is one of the few strong democracies in Latin America. Its president, Michelle Bachelet, is capable and widely respected in the international community, its economy is strong and its vino is maravilloso. Though the ending that Skarmeta gives his characters falls well short of happy, the Chile that he portrays herein is vibrant and strong.

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Chilean Literature

Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta, author of the novels El cartero de Pablo Neruda (The Postman), La boda del poeta (The Poet’s Wedding) and La chica de trombon (The Girl with the Trobone), just presented a new book Borges y otras historias de amor in Rome.



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Chilean Literature