DISCOVERIES

The Postman

A Novel

Antonio Skarmeta

Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver

W.W. Norton: 122 pp., $13.95 paper

BEFore Pablo Neruda’s death in 1973, Chilean journalist Antonio Skarmeta was sent to Neruda’s home on Isla Negra to write a story about “ ‘the erotic geography of the poet.’ In plain language, I was to use any means to make him talk as graphically as possible about the women he had gone to bed with.” Neruda refused, but Skarmeta stayed at Isla Negra and wrote a novel about the constellation of characters he met hanging around the poet’s house. The resulting book, “Ardiente Paciencia” (“Burning Patience”), was published in 1985 and released in English as “The Postman” in 1987. The book, set in Chile in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, ends with Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’etat and Neruda’s death from cancer.

This tale of Mario, a postman encouraged by Neruda to woo the luscious Beatriz Gonzalez, has been interpreted and translated many times. (“Il Postino,” the 1994 movie based on the book, takes place in Italy in the 1950s.) Here, translator Katherine Silver uses such a clean blade that she deftly captures the poet’s sarcasm and the Shakespearean hilarity of Beatriz’s fiercely practical mother: “My dear, if you start confusing poetry with politics, you’ll end up a single mother,” she tells her daughter. “There isn’t a drug in the world worse than all that blah-blah.”

Silver captures the sweet intensity of the couple’s lust without muddying sentimentality. With Neruda’s poems, which are full of metaphor, Mario’s desperate love, the gorgeous landscape and brewing political change, this novel would be too easily swamped by a clumsy, mannered translation.

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A Little Bit of France

Jean-Jacques Sempe

Universe/Rizzoli: 128 pp., $24.95

THESE 78 pen-and-ink drawings by Jean-Jacques Sempe, the New Yorker cover artist and creator of the French comic strip “Le Petit Nicolas,” deliver much more than “A Little Bit of France.” It’s all here: the fussiness of middle-class French life, the weight of history. (Marble busts cast long shadows; a rotting tree bears a proud plaque dated 1380.) There are berets and bicycles; women sipping tea, roundish gentlemen at the sacred ritual of lunch, the splendid matriarchy, the humanity at the heart of French cities. But it’s the trees that steal the show, with their elegant branches filtering thickets of light.

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Soul

And Other Stories

Andrey Platonov

Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler

New York Review Books: 334 pp., $15.95 paper

THE son of a railroad worker and eldest of 11 children, Andrey Platonov (1899-1951) began writing in his teens. By the 1930s, he was on the wrong side of Stalin’s censors. His 15-year-old son was sent to the Gulag, where he contracted tuberculosis and died. Platonov’s work was resurrected in the Soviet Union in the 1980s; “Soul,” the title story (actually a novella) of this collection, was revived in 1999.

It is a rich, toothsome story of young Chagataev, who graduates from an economics institute and is posted to the Asian desert region where he was born. His task is to recover the lost nation of Dzhan (which means “soul”), a place of orphans and horsemen, and convert it to socialism. For Chagataev, determined to find a happiness he’s never known, it is a search for his own lost soul.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com