A Distant Father - Couverture rigide

"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." —Publishers Weekly

"In this jewel of a novella, Chilean Skármeta...exhibits [a] master touch...The beauty of the telling offsets the sadness and desolation of small-town life and the confusions and revelations that Skármeta describes are common to us all." —Library Journal

"A cunning little novella." —Shelf Awareness

"[Skarmeta] knows how to use language without overusing language." —Tweed's

"Compelling." —CounterPunch

"It is amazing how, in so few words, Skármeta is brilliantly able to paint the soul's complexities and turn the world into a less uncertain place. With exquisite prose, as faint as a sigh, Skármeta weaves a fun and ironic story of the torturous road toward  maturity.” —Félix J. Palma, author of the New York Times bestseller The Map of Time

"In this spare, but emotionally rich and big-hearted new novella A Distant Father, the prize-winning Chilean author Antonio Skármeta accomplishes his usual magic of rendering with profound dignity the dilemmas of the human heart. Jacques, a young schoolteacher in the small village of Contulmo is on the cusp of a defining moment, a crisis of identity and manhood that unfolds in a masterfully told story. Desire confronts Jacques with life choices that present a clash of values: to stay with his beloved mother in their rustic idyll; to reunite with his abandoning Parisian father and pursue a more cosmopolitan life; or to explore a passionate relationship with the lovely Teresa. A poetic soul who finds beauty in the ordinary—winter apples, spiders building webs in a corner—Jacques’s haunting journey is archetypal and one we all share: becoming a Self. Written with exquisite calligraphic precision, A Distant Father is a book that plunges the reader into longing and loss, possibility and hope, and never strays from the heart’s truths." —Dale M. Kushner, author of The Conditions of Love

"A Distant Father sparkles. It's an exquisite bow to life's absurdity. Antonio Skarmeta's prose is Chaplinesque—at once gentle-sad and drop-dead funny. And he has a magical touch with physical detail: time and again this tiny novella springs alive in our hands like a pop-up book." —Leah Hager Cohen, author of No Book but the World

"An enchanting, touching memory of what it feels like to grow up, and the ambivalent knowledge one gains in the meantime." —Nürnberger Zeitung

"A Distant Father reads just like a summer love story right before coming of age: painful, but at the same time beautiful." —Berliner Zeitung

"Antonio Skármeta is a cardiac surgeon who is working with words instead of a scalpel." —Osnabrücker Zeitung

"Skarmeta’s narrative reminds me of fairy tales. Odd fairy tales without fairies and without ogres and without spells, but with just absolutely common people instead. It’s the magic of the commonplace.”  —O Globo

"Each fragrant line of A Distant Father is in just the right place. Without excess, every word is positioned with the precision of an artist who works with their eyes closed, fluidly. Without artifice, without sterile rhetoric, and without pyrotechnics." —La vanguardia

"Poetic." —El Periódico de Catalunya

When Dad went away, my mother was suddenly extinguished, like a candle blown out by a gust of frosty wind.

Like her, I loved my father to the point of madness. And I too wanted him to love me back. But he was gone a lot. When he was home, he’d write letters at night on my old Remington portable typewriter and pile them up on the desk for me to hand on when the truck came to pick up the sheets. They were letters to his friends, he said. “Mes vieux copains.”

Occasionally, when we’ve been drinking brandy, the miller drops some nugget of information, and so I always listen to him with great attention. But his trails lead nowhere.  He keeps things quiet by talking about them. Or rather, he talks about things while keeping them quiet. It’s as though he had a secret pact with my father. Un jurement de sang.

When Pierre decided to leave, I was just about to graduate from the teachers’ college in Santiago. The week before I was to arrive in Contulmo, elementary school teaching certificate in hand, he told my mother that the cold climate of southern Chile cracked his bones, and that a ship was waiting for him in the harbor at Valparaíso.
I got off the train and he got on, boarding the very same car.

In southern Chile, the trains still belch smoke.

My father shouldn’t have left the same night I arrived. I didn’t even get a chance to open my suitcase and show him my diploma. My mother and I wept, both of us.