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GUEST: Antonio Skarmeta, author of the award winning novel, The Postman, and his latest, “The Dancer and the Thief”

Chile’s sprawling metropolis capital of Santiago is the scene of acclaimed novelist Antonio Skarmeta’s latest book, “The Dancer and the Thief.” Set in the wake of Pinochet’s dictatorship, the book’s protagonists struggle to make peace with their lives in a city trapped in past and present injustices. Antonio Skarmeta fled Chile following Pinochet’s dictatorial ouster of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973. Skarmeta became exiled in West-Berlin, Germany when nostalgia for his homeland led him to write the internationally acclaimed novel, “The Postman.” The novel was later adapted to the big screen as “Il Postino,” and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Skarmeta returned to Chile in 1989, and became the ambassador to Germany from 2000-2003. Newly translated into English, Skarmeta’s latest book, “The Dancer and the Thief,” like “Il Postino,” is being made into a movie starring Diego Luna.

In the novel, Angel Santiago is a young man released from prison by an amnesty granted by the civilian president for stealing a wealthy landowner’s horse. With no institutional help to transition into everyday life, and facing a neo-liberal economy rife with unemployment, Santiago seeks out the help of an infamous bank robber Nicolas Vergara Grey who has also been granted amnesty. The young man wants to persuade the legendary thief to pull one last heist against a former Pinochet goon. All the while Santiago falls in love with Victoria Ponce, a teenage dancer, whose depression stems from the murder of her father by the dictatorship. Together the three make their way in a transitory society that has failed to absolve the injustices of the past which only enables new injustices to continue in the present.

Antonio Skarmeta will be signing copies of his book, The Dancer and the Thief on Wednesday March 5th at 7 pm at the Los Angeles Public Library, 630 W. 5th St., Los Angeles, CA 90071 – (213) 228-7000

Rough Transcript:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Antonio Skarmeta is in Los Angeles right now and he joins us in studio. Welcome to Uprising.

Antonio Skarmeta: Hello. How are you?

Sonali: Doing very well. Thanks so much for joining us. A huge fan of your first book and I just finished reading the second book and very much enjoyed it. Tell the listeners a little bit about the story itself and the setting of the story. This is modern-day Chile, modern-day Santiago and you have, I guess, three main characters who represent different parts, I think, or different aspects of today’s Chile.

Antonio: Well, I should say these characters, first of all, they represent themselves. I try not to make people, live characters, represent something else. But of course, Chile’s quite an interesting country because of its history. People tend to see what they could represent. But my three characters are two scoundrels, they have been released from jail and they will try to make a living in Santiago and a seventeen-year old girl, a dancer, who is in the last year of high school who loves dancing, who wants to be a professional dancer and she has some problems. It looks like she’s not going to be able to end high school because of a certain sadness. This girl, her name is Victoria, her father was killed in the time of the dictatorship. She has lived with the absence of her father for many years and now she feels very, very bad about it so she has no force to go with the school and she’s about to quit and, at that moment, she meets these two funny scoundrels who have just left the jail and they are live, they connect, and they interact.

Sonali: And the two scoundrels, as you call them, a young man and an older gentleman, the two of them have been granted amnesty because they had committed non-violent crimes.

Antonio: Right.

Sonali: Tell us about the setting of the novel or the part of the novel that – I love the way you don’t really go very deeply into the politics but they’re always there throughout because of the tumultuous political history of Chile. But where did this amnesty come from and how many people have been imprisoned in Chile over the years?

Antonio: Now we are living in Chile in a democracy. Quite a good democracy after the brutal Pinochet dictatorship, we’re enjoying democracy. But the jails, like in all Latin American countries, are full of people and sometimes they release some people that are not dangerous because they have committed relatively minor crimes but the point is that they put some other inside. It was very curious because once I was doing a program like this in Spain and suddenly the man who was conducting the program called the local jail and he had given to the prisoners my book and he wanted the prisoners in the jail to discuss the book with me. And one of them said, hey, Mr. Skarmeta, I have read The Dancer and the Thief and I see that you are one of us – you have been there, you cannot deny that!

Sonali: Well, that�s an interesting story. So, let�s talk a little bit about the fact, in your book, even though you said Chile�s today is a democracy. But, yet there�s this grinding poverty in the book that all the three protagonists in your book have to face and in fact that�s a lot of what drives them to do some of the things they do.

Antonio: Yes, you�re right. My characters are outcasts. They live at the margins of society and in this model society, sometimes you don�t have a place. And then they are striving for finding a place in the society. There�s a lot of poverty although Chile�s doing quite well with its economics. The point is that the distribution of wealth is very bad. And it hasn�t been done enough to solve this problem. And that�s the reason why so many people live at the margins of society and sometimes they move to crime.

Sonali: I�m wondering if you might be able read an excerpt from the book for our listeners.

Antonio: Okay, will do it gladly. This is from the middle of the novel. This old safecracker tries to go back to his family and he has been rejected. His wife doesn�t want to see him anymore. And his son doesn�t like him. He even wants to change his name. The name of this guy is Vergara Grey and he has an appointment with his wife to discuss the situation and before he goes into the restaurant he walks around the river Mapocho:

That night, Vergara Grey took a walk along the Mapocho River, its waters brown like the city�s refuse that fill its banks. Old tires, [unintelligible], � tin cans, rotten vegetables, branches, dead ducks, crushed pigeons and, every once in a while, the human cadaver. After the military coup, people would stand on the bridges and point down at the dead floating by, their skulls and chests crushed by soldier�s bullets. There were days when the familias of the disappeared would sit on these banks hoping that the bodies they hadn�t found at the police station or the morgue, could float by so they could give their loved ones a proper burial. Now, the city had been modernized and the Mapocho River tamed by civil engineers. They diverted the schools to build freeways as straight as arrows that took the city�s wealthy citizens from the classy suburbs to their banks downtown. The river was no longer the refuse of the street urchins and young hooligans. Now, it was a kind of backyard to Santiago�s financial center. Along its banks rose four or five tall steel buildings that aspired to being skyscrapers. Chileans, with their self-deprecating sense of humor, had unofficially baptized the pretensions, the stuck-up neighborhood, San-hatten. Because of Santiago and Manhatten. So, they baptized it with humor, San-hatten.

Sonali: Antonio Skarmeta, author of the award-winning novel, The Postman, and his latest also winning an award, the prestigious Planeta Prize in Spain, selling more than a quarter million copies, The Dancer and the Thief. That was an excerpt from the book that he just shared with us. We talked about the extreme poverty of many Chileans, Antonio, but also two of the three protagonists in your book are young. And, today young Chileans, and you demonstrated this in your book, are sort of caught between the lure of western digital technology and pop-culture and also, of course, their own current realities. Can you talk about how Chilean youth are coping with the political past?

Antonio: Well, they are doing quite well again because this is the generation born in Democracy, so they have heard about how violent Chile was before they were born. And, they are enjoying more and more spaces of freedom so they feel quite free from the past and they are inventing a new Chile. It�s quite a powerful generation. They have a beautiful literature, very good rock music and even the Chilean film in the street has revived. So, things are looking not bad at all. And of course they have political conscience. They know what the dictatorship was, how much the people suffered and they are sure that they�re not going that way anymore, whatever problems the country finds. So, it �s quite a good generation.

Sonali: In your previous novel, The Postman, you featured, very prominently, your close friend Pablo Neruda as a character. In this book, The Dancer and the Thief, we hear about a poet by the name of Gabriella Mistral. Tell our listeners who she was.

Antonio: Over and over, yes. Well, you�re right to mention that. Gabriella Mistral is another Chilean poet. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature, too. And, this is very curious because we are a very, very small line at the very end of the world and we have two Nobel Prizes in Literature and, of course, Chileans are very proud of this. Pablo Neruda and Gabriella Mistral. Gabriella Mistral was a very strong woman, a very passionate poet who interpreted the people in our country with luminous verses. And she used to live in New York and all around the world. And I have written about her because I am obsessed with this character. Many texts. I have written short stories and in my last two novels, my last three novels, the poet�s wearing the girl with the trombone and in this last one, The Dancer and the Thief, Gabriella Mistral is the energy that attracts some of the characters. In this case, the dancer Victoria, in homage to her dead father, she tries to create a dance piece on one of the poems by Gabriella Mistral. And to do that, she received the help of these two scoundrels and they have nothing to do with [?] and they have nothing to do with art but they have an understanding for human feelings. And that�s, I think, that�s a force of the novel that people get interested in each other, they feel compassion for the other and they feel the humor that the other person has and then, I think they like to play games. They are people who are active in front of the other to make them feel good.

Sonali: These two scoundrels that you keep referring to, their role in the novel is basically focusing on a big, big heist, a big robbery that they�re planning. But somehow it seems justified because the focus or the target is a man who enriched himself vis-�-vis the Pinochet dictatorship. How are Chileans dealing, and even in your novel, with the legacy of the past? Is there a sense of reconciliation, is there a sense of justice today?

Antonio: There is a sense of reconciliation, there is a sense of justice. But, at the same time, we have the feeling that many things found no solution. There are many people in Chile who committed crimes against human rights that are free and they were not taken into trial. That�s something that we resent. Let�s take a sentence. The first democratic president after the Pinochet dictatorship said, when he informed the country about how many violations against human rights took place in Chile. He said, �Now we are going to do justice; justice, as far as we can.� This is a very dramatic sentence. You realize that you have to be very, very careful when you move from a strong dictatorship to a new democracy, you have to be very prudent, very cautious not to make mistakes. Now, 15 or 16 years after the dictatorship ended, now we feel that we can breathe, that there is no danger anymore. But, we lived a long time with many doubts and we, in democracy, couldn�t do all the things we wanted to do. One of the things, to make justice, to bring all the criminals to jail. You know that Pinochet, himself, the dictator, died. There were many trials, many cases against him, but he died in freedom. There was no force enough to condemn him, to put him in prison.

Sonali: But, of course, he came to power with the express help of this government, the United States. How do Chileans feel, particularly young Chileans, about the fact that the United States, the biggest superpower in the world played such a big role in shaping the destiny of their country?

Antonio: Well, at that time, we are talking about 1973, so a lot of years ago. It was a time of the so-called Cold War and the big tension between the Communists was it doesn�t exist anymore and the western world was very intense so you have to put this episode in the frame of that. Well, the intervention of the United States, they are to help the people who were against the democratic president agenda. It has been proved. The Senate of the United States has written many reports, books and there are lots of unclassified documents that are very well-known. There are a hundred books written by American journalists about that. But, the point is that when the United States realized what kind of dictatorship Pinochet was, United States also tried to get rid of Pinochet because Pinochet committed acts of terrorism inside American territory. There were some criminals that killed one prominent Chilean politician in Washington, D.C. and that was the beginning of the end of the love affair between the Chilean junta and the United States. And then in the last year, the United States was quite active in helping the democrats in Chile to get rid of Pinochet.

Sonali: Finally, Antonio Skarmeta, your book, The Dancer and the Thief, is being turned into a film�

Antonio: May I say something? Because there is information. It�s going to be a film, it�s hasn�t been made. The rights have been acquired by the same producer who made The Postman, Il Postino. The director is going to be a Spanish man, a Spaniard director, Fernando Trueva, who got here in L.A. some years ago, an Academy Award, an Oscar for the film, Belle Epoch. And you said that one of the characters would be played by Diego Luna. What I can tell you is that he was offered the role. If he is going to take it or not, I don�t know. What I�m sure of is, because he accepted and he is under contract, the man who is going to play the other scoundrel is the Argentinian, Ricardo [?]

Sonali: Very good. Well, best of luck with that and may you enjoy as much success with your book turning into a new film as you did with The Postman. Antonio Skarmeta, thank you so much for joining us today.

Antonio: Thank you.

Special Thanks to Julie Svendsen for transcribing this interview