Customer Reviews

The Dancer and the Thief: A Novel

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book follows the tradition of magical realism that so successfully portrays live in South and Central America. Both the characters and the plot held my attention to the end. Life in Santiago comes through as the characters attempt to better their circumstances. The time honored plot of an older man helping a younger man obtain the love of his live is executed very well.
It was not one of my favorite books, but I enjoyed every minute that I was reading it.

This book is a lively, fun and adventurous tale, which though purportedly fictional, I found entirely believable and thoroughly engrossing. Some might find it geared toward a somewhat adolescent audience in the sense that its plot is a surface drama for the greatest part and doesn't probe the intellect or psychology of its characters deeply, or otherwise weigh in on more "serious" matters, but the sympathetically painted characters were brought very much to life and I found myself wanting to head to South America in search of Victoria Ponce to make her mine by the end of the book(I exercised some restraint earlier on in my reading in light of her attachment to another).

A book for the senses more than the mind, though no less skillful the writing of it. No great issues of weighty philosophical importance here, but real people with real situations, plans, adventures and problems, set in the quasi-criminal milieu of modern day Chile, all of which I found highly engaging. Skarmeta's skillful writing creates full characters rather than stick figures, his characters coming to life so that one feels for them as if one knows them, or could know them, amongst the people one sees every day. All in all, an exciting, fun and adventurous tale that makes it hard to set aside once one begins reading it. Well worth reading, particularly if you have a long hard couple days of lying on the beach punctuated with interruptions of sex, sea and more sun to accompany it.

Read this for my book club, and everyone seemed to enjoy it, and it gave us a fair amount of material for our discussion. The main characters are complex and likeable, and the plot is fairly well paced. The author and translator do a great job of capturing the cultural feel of Chile. I won't spoil the ending, but some were not satisfied with it.