'DICTATORS TRY TO paralyse people with fear - immobilise and manipulate them,' says Chilean novelist Antonio Skarmeta. 'But some people always manage to break through the fear. They foil paralysis by reacting, for instance, with their use of irony. The natives of Latin America were afraid of the Spanish invaders, but perhaps a new history began when a native managed to paint a parrot on the shoulder of the crucified Christ - it meant taking a personal initiative.'
Skarmeta's first international success came in the 1980s with The Postman, a novel about the relationship between the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and a postman on the isle of Capri. Neruda lived in Capri in the early 1950s, but Skarmeta met him in the Chilean coastal resort of Isla Negra. The novel was made into a successful film, Il Postino, by the Italian production company Cecchi Gori. It's now in talks to make a movie of Skarmeta's recent novel, El Baile de la Victoria, about a female ballet dancer who collaborates with two delinquents to hoodwink the secret police of former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pincohet.
Much of Skarmeta's writing swings between humour and drama. 'I want to show characters not with brutal objectivity, not just as they are, but also as they aspire to be, as they could become - true to Dostoevsky's dictum that compassion means seeing people as God thought they could be.'
In his outlook he remains true to the adolescent who once cycled around the streets of the Chilean capital, Santiago, imitating James Dean or reciting Shakespeare's poems in expressionless Robert Mitchum-style. A keen soccer fan, capable of naming all the players in the Chilean team of 30 years ago, he likes to bet on horses and enjoys films and pop music, even working Billy Joel's Just the Way You Are into a recent short story about the son of a philosophy teacher arrested by Pinochet's goons.
Born in 1940 in Antofagasta, a mining town near the north Chilean desert, Skarmeta studied literature and philosophy in Santiago before graduating from Columbia University in New York with a thesis on Argentinian novelist Julio Cortazar. In the 1970s, after Pinochet seized power, he moved first to Argentina, then to Berlin. There, having written for cinema and television, he taught script-writing.
In 1989, after the fall of Pinochet, Skarmeta returned to Santiago, where he lives with his German second wife, Nora.
Like Neruda before him, he became an ambassador - which took him back to Germany for three years from 2000. But he says he has less in common with northern Europeans than those from the south. 'Sometimes it's not easy for Chileans to understand north Europeans, but they share the culture of Latin Europeans. They both give prime importance to feelings, to sentiments. There's the same vitality, the same sense of irony and humour.
