Jacques, the narrator of Antonio Skármeta's A Distant Father, is the anemic 21-year-old schoolmaster in Contulmo, an isolated village in southern Chile where the inhabitants are all "secondary figures, not protagonists." He has bronchitis from smoking cheap cigarettes and lives with his mother near the mill. Unfortunately, on the same day that Jacques returned to the village with his teaching certificate, his father disappeared.
Jacques continues his absent father's friendship with the miller, who knows the missing man better than his own family does and mysteriously offers to take Jacques to his first whorehouse, in the larger, neighboring town of Angol. While there, Jacques also hopes to buy a birthday present for a student of his--a boy whose 17-year-old girl has set her heart on the young professor. Out of this slightly raunchy setup, Skármeta skillfully builds his simple drama.
Unexpectedly, when the schoolmaster gets to Angol, not only does he discover a soft-hearted whore in the whorehouse, he also finds his missing father outside the movie theater. He's become the town projectionist, but that's only the first surprise for his son. And when the young professor finally arrives at his student's climactic birthday party, the gathering is life-changing for more than just Jacques.
All of Skármeta's literary effects are achieved with simple elements and swift, economic strokes; characters are established in only a few words. At 105 pages, told in ultra-short chapters, this is a cunning little novella that pulls off surprising emotional wallops. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.