A novel that I bought with my dad as a
Christmas gift for my mom (the only book I ever recall buying in a supermarket
and not in a bookshop). I still remember my dad explaining to me that Massimo
Troisi, the actor who played the titular postman in the movie taken from the
novel, was a wonderful artist who died right after finishing the film.
When I read it as a teenager the book made want
to get into poetry. I obviously tried with Neruda first, then followed it with the
Poètes maudits, Pessoa, Lorca, Kavafis
and many others, but to no avail. I was probably too shallow for poetry back
then. I should try again, but I’m afraid I’m not much deeper than I was back
then.
Skármeta’s
novel is about Chile, about its most illustrious poet (Neruda, clearly), and
about the poetry of the everyday life of the Chileans. There are plenty of
novels in which important historical figures mentor some young and uneducated
locals, and they often run the risk of becoming trivial. This novel avoids
that. Mario, Neruda’s postman, does not evolve into a luminary of the literary
world, and probably this is the reason why the novel isn’t banal, just
touchingly beautiful. If at first his inability to express his feelings and the
need to recur to Neruda’s poems is a bit too Cyranoesque, some of Mario’s
simple thoughts are actually reflections of very serious issues, both political
and literary (after all, does poetry belong to those who write it or to those
who use it?).
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