Books, Arts & Manners: Unusual Relationships

I MAY have particular empathy for Mario Ruoppolo, the hero of Michael Radford’s fetching and bittersweet The Postman (Il postino). Mario is a hapless fisherman’s son on a small island off Naples, a fellow desperate for change. It comes when the celebrated Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, exiled for his leftist politics, settles on the island. So much mail arrives for Neruda from all over that an assistant mailman has to be hired to cycle with it up to the mountaintop villa the Nerudas are occupying. Mario, impressed by Neruda’s reputation as a great lover first, and poet second, acquires a volume of his verse and requests a dedication. He gets an impersonal autograph, “Regards, Pablo Neruda,” which leaves him dissatisfied.

I did better upon encountering Neruda at a PEN congress. Knowing my man, I delegated my girlfriend to solicit an inscription in a Neruda tome. Told my given name, he wrote, “Para John, mi amigo, Pablo Neruda,” plus the place and date. But unlike Mario, who uses Neruda to win the girl he longs for, I did my own wooing, and lost her. Life can also be less strange than fiction.

JS

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John Simon

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I MAY have particular empathy for Mario Ruoppolo, the hero of Michael Radford’s fetching and bittersweet The Postman (Il postino). Mario is a hapless fisherman’s son on a small island off Naples, a fellow desperate for change. It comes when the celebrated Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, exiled for his leftist politics, settles on the island. So much mail arrives for Neruda from all over that an assistant mailman has to be hired to cycle with it up to the mountaintop villa the Nerudas are occupying. Mario, impressed by Neruda’s reputation as a great lover first, and poet second, acquires a volume of his verse and requests a dedication. He gets an impersonal autograph, “Regards, Pablo Neruda,” which leaves him dissatisfied.

I did better upon encountering Neruda at a PEN congress. Knowing my man, I delegated my girlfriend to solicit an inscription in a Neruda tome. Told my given name, he wrote, “Para John, mi amigo, Pablo Neruda,” plus the place and date. But unlike Mario, who uses Neruda to win the girl he longs for, I did my own wooing, and lost her. Life can also be less strange than fiction.