A Distant Father

July 21, 2014
The disillusioned yet hopeful narrator of Skarmeta’s (The Postman) slim and subtle novel is Jacques, a 21-year-old school teacher and literary translator based in the village of Contulmo in southern Chile. Two years after his father suddenly abandons him and his mother, Jacques befriends the miller, Cristian, who was close to his dad. When Jacques isn’t spending time with his devastated mother or Cristian, he works on translations of French poems and Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le metro, with ambitions of making a name for himself in print. Jacques takes a trip to Angol to sleep with prostitutes and bumps into his estranged father, Pierre, who now runs a movie theater and has a baby. Upon Jacques’s return to Contulmo, his outspoken student Augusto Gutiérrez convinces him to attend his 15th birthday party and promises to set Jacques up with his older sister on the condition that he take him along to visit the brothels the next time he goes to Angol. At the party, Jacques learns a secret about his father’s baby, which inspires him to put a “plot” into action. Skarmeta treats his characters with a tender hand and, with impressive economy, balances dark humor with a sober and realistic portrait of a stagnant culture whose people are always longing for something better.

October 15, 2014

In this jewel of a novella, Chilean Skarmeta, author of the 1985 novel that inspired the 1994 Academy Award-winning movie Il Postino, exhibits the same master touch as he did in that book. Here he details the coming-of-age experience of poetry-minded Jacques, a young teacher in Contulmo, a village so small that pleasure-seeking villagers must take the train to the larger village of Angol to find even a whorehouse. Before the story opens, a light has gone out of the young man's life because his French father has abandoned the family in Chile to return to his native Paris; like his mother, Jacques loves his father "to the point of madness." He is now tempted in three directions: he can remain at home as his mother's surrogate husband; stay on as the lover of the attractive sister of one of his students; or follow his father to Paris for the literary life that he craves. VERDICT The beauty of the telling offsets the sadness and desolation of small-town life and the confusions and revelations that Skarmeta describes are common to us all. [See Prepub Alert, 8/11/14.]--Jack Shreve, Chicago

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