Watch Where/Wolf

Most famous in the United States as the author of "Burning Patience" (the basis for the movie "Il Postino"), Chilean writer Antonio Skarmeta has published fiction for forty years. These stories, culled from half a dozen collections issued in Spanish before 1990, are remarkable for their variety and scope, but (I'm afraid) the translations are far from fluid and often seem to be rendered too literally rather than idiomatically into English. Nevertheless, beneath the occasional linguistic missteps of this edition, there is some good stuff here, often focusing on living in poverty, survival under oppression, and life in exile. In fact, there's not a bad story in the bunch. The best story is "The Composition," relating an odious attempt by a tyrannical government to enlist children to report on their parents' political activities. The aging couple in "Fish" seek to break free from the humiliating economic and physical dependence on their son and daughter-in-law's charity. In "Taking the Plunge," a father refuses to face the eventuality of his adult son's leaving home. The young man in "The Cigarette" worries he may have killed a man in the heat of the moment during a political riot. Several of the stories take Skarmeta away from his modern-day homeland. "Stuck in the Mud" manages to be simultaneously the funniest and the most melancholy story, reminiscent of the Faulkneresque narratives of Cormac McCarthy: a pair of down-on-their-luck immigrants in New York sell blood for cash meant to last them for a week--and end up spending all of it on a night of booze and women. And the title story describes a Spanish governor's betrayal of the laborers who worked in a sixteenth-century American colony. Many of the stories show the influence of American literature on Skarmeta's prose (he was a translator of authors ranging from Melville to Mailer): "Fish" and "Stuck in the Mud" have a Southern Gothic flavor, while "Cinderella in San Francisco" recalls the autobiographical patter of Kerouac. And, of course, the ghosts of Pablo Neruda and other Chilean writers hover in the background. Yet Skarmeta's style is hard to pin down; influenced by any number of traditions, he writes a different story every time but his fiction still maintains a remarkable consistency.