Antonio Skármeta, a Chilean novelist, screenplay writer, playwright and television presenter who captured his country’s affections with warmhearted tales of its suffering and redemption through dictatorship and democracy, died on Oct. 15 at his home in Santiago. He was 83.
His death, after a long struggle with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, was announced by President Gabriel Boric Font of Chile on his X account.
Mr. Boric paid tribute to the leading role Mr. Skármeta played in his country’s cultural life. He praised Mr. Skármeta “for the life you lived,” adding: “For the stories, the novels and the theater. For the political commitment. For the book show that expanded the boundaries of literature.”
Mr. Skármeta’s literary career traced the arc of Chile’s modern political journey in lightly ironic stories that depicted the strategies of ordinary citizens faced with repression and arbitrary government.
He lived that journey himself — as an activist supporting the leftist government of Salvador Allende in 1970; as a political exile in Argentina and in Germany after the 1973 coup d’état that inaugurated Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal 15-year military dictatorship; as host of a popular television program about literature (the “book show” Mr. Boric mentioned) in the 1990s, after democracy returned to Chile; and as his country’s ambassador in Berlin from 2000 to 2003.
His best-known work, the 1985 novel “Ardiente Pacienca” (“Burning Patience”) — the story of a postal worker who befriends Chile’s national poet Pablo Neruda and used the friendship to woo a young local woman — illustrated a method Skármeta typically used: weaving real-life figures and disasters with fictional characters who must cope with them, often with bumbling but very human ineptitude.
The book, which began as a radio script during Mr. Skármeta’s exile in Germany, was translated into 30 languages and made into several films, including “The Postman” (“Il Postino”), released in 1994, which was nominated for several Academy Awards (it won for best score), as well as an opera. “The best scenes in the book and the movie concern Mario’s stammering courtship, through Neruda’s poetry, of a local beauty,” Michael Wood wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1996.
He also wrote more than a dozen other novels and short-story collections, many of which were translated into English, and won several Latin American literary awards as well as France’s prestigious Prix Médicis in 2001 for the 1999 book “La Boda del Poeta” (“The Poet’s Wedding”).
Once, on his book-chat program “El Show de los Libros” on Chilean television, Mr. Skármeta had himself filmed reading Neruda’s “Ode to the Cat” while a real-life cat wove itself around his neck. Mr. Skármeta smiled gamely and kept reading. This, his friend the Chilean-American writer Ariel Dorfman said in an interview, was a good example of his desire to “bridge the relationship between the cultural and the popular.” And because of the success of his television program, Mr. Skármeta was immediately recognized throughout Chile.
The subject of his writings — the tormented latter-day history of his country, told through the travails of its citizens — reinforced that connection.
“He sort of forged happiness out of sadness,” Mr. Dorfman said. “All his characters are imbued with sadness, and yet have enormous energy and love and tenderness.”
In the 2011 novel “Días del Arcoíris” (“The Days of the Rainbow), set during the referendum in Chile that Pinochet, under international pressure, called in 1988 to determine whether he should stay in power, the narrator’s father has been arrested.
“In cases like these, good people cannot do anything, because they’re all afraid,” the narrator’s girlfriend tells him. “We should try to make the others do something.”
“The bad ones?” the narrator asks.
“Nobody’s one hundred percent good or completely bad,” she answers. And in the end the good guys win, love prevails, and even the sinister minister of the interior is revealed as not so evil.
The Mexican novelist Juan Villoro, in an introduction to Mr. Skármeta’s 2023 short-story collection, “The Names of the Things That Were There,” described his method as the construction of “scenes of brittle sentimentality inside the family unit, framed by historical events that affect the characters,” in which “objects and ‘insignificant’ gestures acquire transcendent meanings.”
Mr. Skármeta’s critics outside Latin America were not always convinced by his happy endings. “Antonio Skármeta has always been a sentimentalist,” Lorna Scott Fox wrote in a review of “A Distant Father” for The Times Literary Supplement in 2014.
The poet W.S. Merwin, writing in The New York Times in 1987, was critical of the “two dimensions” of “Burning Patience,” which he called “a slight tale” and “a kind of vaudeville, a literary comic strip.”
“The principals,” he wrote, “are caricatures, in primary colors, and the plot is the old story, told in a jaunty style that works up into mock-purple.”
Indeed, some critics have called Mr. Skármeta a principal progenitor of what the Yale literary scholar Anibal González called the “neo-sentimental mode” in Latin American fiction, a kind of reaction against both social realism and the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
Defending his turn toward more popular, sentimental themes, Mr. Skármeta told an interviewer in 1990: “I’ve got a ‘neo-democratic’ idea of the function of a writer. I define versatility as the internal democracy of the writer.” Explaining “El Show de Los Libros,” Mr. Skármeta said: “You can’t reduce literature to boring things, nor can you relate television to a show. I have developed as a writer in the media, and I don’t abhor it.”
Esteban Antonio Skármeta Vranicic was born on Nov. 7, 1940, in Antofagasta, Chile, the son of Antonio Skármeta Simunovic, an accountant, and Magdalena Vranicic, a milliner. Both his parents were the children of Croatian immigrants. He attended the Colegio San Luis, a middle school, in Antofagasta and went to high school at the Instituto Nacional in Santiago. Studies in philosophy at the University of Chile led to a Fulbright scholarship in 1964 to attend Columbia University, where he obtained a master’s degree after writing his thesis on the Argentine-French writer Julio Cortázar.
On his return to Chile in 1966, he taught philosophy at the Instituto Nacional; published his first book of stories, “El Pasión”; and became one of the numerous left-leaning intellectuals, including Mr. Dorfman, who supported Mr. Allende, joining the pro-Allende Popular Unitary Action Movement.
He later commented to an interviewer: “We confused desires with reality in a thunderous way, and, despite the fact that we were intellectuals, and educated, and well-read, the climate that existed in the country, the desperation, made us more lyrical than analysts.”
When Mr. Allende was overthrown in a coup supported by the United States in 1973, Mr. Skármeta and Mr. Dorfman, who was working for the president, “spent that day crying together,” Mr. Dorfman recalled. One of Mr. Skármeta’s better-known novels, “Soñé Que la Nieve Ardía” (“I Dreamt the Snow Was Burning”), published in 1975, is set against the background of the coup.
That book was written while he was in exile in Germany, where he had received a scholarship from the German Academy for Academic Exchange. In 1979 he became a professor at the German Academy for Film and Television in West Berlin.
He would go on to write a number of screenplays, including a number for the German director Peter Lilienthal, and five plays. He returned to Chile in 1989 and won the country’s National Literature Prize in 2014.
Mr. Skármeta is survived by his wife, Nora Maria Preperski; two sons, Beltran and Gabriel Boisier, from his first marriage, to Cecilia Boisier, which ended in divorce; a son from his marriage to Ms. Preperski, Fabian Skármeta Preperski; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
A wake for Mr. Skármeta was held at the National Theater of Chile, attended by the country’s culture minister, Carolina Arredondo.
Mr. Dorfman recalled that once, when he and Mr. Skármeta were at the Louvre in Paris, his friend couldn’t stop looking out the windows, at the couples visible on the grounds.
“He was fascinated by human relations,” Mr. Dorfman said. “And how difficult it is to understand one another.”
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