The Dancer and the Thief: A Novel - Softcover

Skármeta, Antonio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393333671 ISBN 13: 9780393333671

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

"Traps the reader from the first page with its political undertones and its undeniable charm." ―Isabel Allende

This "powerful, humane," prize-winning novel of politics, ballet, and a spectacular heist by a reluctant master thief and his eager young protégé, "conjures...a contemporary Santiago, Chile, where the memory of Pinochet's reign and the 'disappearing' of citizens still looms" (Publishers Weekly). With prisons overflowing in Chile, the president declares a general amnesty for all nonviolent criminals. Ángel Santiago, a youth determined to avenge abuse he received in jail, seeks out the notorious bank robber Nicolás Vergara Grey, whose front-page exploits won him a reputation he would rather leave behind. Their plan for an ambitious and daring robbery is complicated by the galvanizing presence of Victoria Ponce, a virtuosic dancer and high-school dropout whose father was a victim of the regime.

Praised for his "ability to place a personal story in the context of a national upheaval and make it warm, funny and universal" (San Francisco Chronicle), Antonio Skármeta sets this exuberant love story against the backdrop of the new Chile, free from the Pinochet dictatorship but beholden to the perils of globalization. The Dancer and the Thief, which won Spain's prestigious Planeta Prize, is a remarkable new novel from one of South America's finest storytellers. Reading group guide included.

About this title

About the Author:

Antonio Skármeta achieved worldwide renown with The Postman (Il Postino). His fiction has since received dozens of awards and has been translated into nearly thirty languages worldwide. He lives in Santiago, Chile.

KATHERINE SILVER is an award-winning liter- ary translator and the codirector of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC). Her translations include works by Ce´sar Aira, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Jose´ Emilio Pacheco, Elena Poniatowska, Jorge Franco, and Marti´n Ada´n, among others.

From The Washington Post:

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

The salient characteristic of the fiction of Antonio Skármeta is charm. This is by no means the faint compliment it may at first seem to be. Charm is a quality to be valued wherever one finds it, for it simultaneously engages and pleases the person to whom it is directed. In his most famous novel, The Postman, Skármeta tells the story of a humble Chilean postal carrier who befriends the great poet Pablo Neruda and eventually enlists him as an ally in his campaign to win the love of the most desirable woman in town. A charming little book, it was made into an even more charming movie, "Il Postino," which enjoyed considerable popular success and was nominated for several Academy Awards in 1996.

Now, Skármeta charms once again. The Dancer and the Thief, like The Postman, is a love story, and an improbable one as well. It takes place in Santiago in the years following the fall of Augusto Pinochet, the end of state-induced terror and the tentative, hesitant dawn of democracy. Santiago is "slippery, ambiguous, promiscuous," trying to catch up with the world. Skármeta writes about it with a mixture of affection and exasperation:

"Now the city had been modernized and the Mapocho [River] tamed by civil engineers. They diverted its course to build freeways, straight as arrows, that took the city's wealthy citizens from the exclusive suburbs to their banks downtown. The river was no longer the refuge of 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 that pretentious, stuck-up neighborhood Sanhattan."

This is the same place where, "after the military coup, people would stand on the bridges and point down at the dead floating by, their skulls and chests crushed by soldiers' bullets." That time is gone, but memories of it haunt the city and the country, and in various ways it touches the lives of the three people at the center of this novel. The protagonist -- the thief of the title -- is Ángel Santiago, 20 years old, who as the novel opens is being released from prison after two years in custody for stealing a horse. Known to his fellow prisoners as "The Cherub" because of his youth and stunning good looks, he was subjected to gang rape by inmates at the time of his incarceration and is determined, now, to retaliate against the warden who countenanced it.

A second prisoner released at the same time is Nicolás Vergara Gray, a safecracker of legendary skills who leaves prison with "a solemn vow to God, the press, and the prison authorities that he would never again break the law, and with the money his partner owed him for having kept his mouth shut throughout the trial, he would be able to lead a modest and honorable life without fleecing anyone or groveling for a few pesos." Though his "crimes have been unanimously acclaimed as true works of art," now he wants nothing so much as to reunite with his wife, Teresa Capriatti, "the most beautiful woman in the world," and their son, Pedro Pablo, a teenager who, "though he had made a few cursory visits to his father in jail, never even tried to hide his complete indifference."

The third person at the center of the novel -- the dancer of the title -- is Victoria, a "tall, thin" teenager whom Ángel encounters outside a movie theater soon after his release from prison. He is immediately captivated by her. Her father was a victim of Pinochet's terror, arrested "in front of the school where he taught" and found two days later "in a ditch with his throat slit." She thinks about her father constantly because she fears that "if I don't, he'll disappear forever." She attends dance school and displays enormous talent, but is expelled and reduced to "frequenting raunchy movie houses just to keep warm." She's "a very sensitive girl" whose dream is "to dance ballet . . . at the Municipal Theater in Santiago, the Colón in Buenos Aires, the Teatro de Madrid, the Metropolitan Opera House in New York," because she holds "ballet and modern dance in a sacred space, immune to all worldly corruption, beyond the reach of her depressed mother, her father's murder, the professors who looked down on her for her indifference, for her silence."

All in all they are an appealing crew, but they live in or near the edge of the criminal world, where "the only things that work are violence and patience. . . . The first will make you rich or lead you back to jail; the second will keep you poor but free." Those are the words of a prisoner known as Lira the Dwarf. Ángel, who is "already losing patience with being poor," is determined to carry out a plan that the Dwarf imparted to him in prison, a bold raid on the office of a corrupt government official who rakes in enormous bribes. The problem is that the plan requires the participation of Vergara Gray, because only he has the skill to crack the safe in which the money is kept. Thus there begins the second of the novel's two courtships. The first is Ángel courting Victoria. The second is Ángel courting Vergara Gray -- praising his skills, appealing to his vanity, gleefully asserting that "we are father and son, Don Nico!"

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 Skármeta 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, Skármeta 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 Skármeta 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.

Skármeta 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 Skármeta gives his characters falls well short of happy, the Chile that he portrays herein is vibrant and strong.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0393333671
• ISBN 13: 9780393333671
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 314