Saltpeter mining towns, Hernán Rivera Letelier and Nostalgia for the Light
Couple months ago I had a discussion with a theater enthusiast, friend of mine. She proposed a theatrical play titled "The Movie-Teller" (Η αφηγήτρια ταινιών). Unfortunately theaters had stopped performing due to warm weather. The story she described however intrigued me and I found the book it was based on [in Politeia/ in Amazon], written by Hernán Rivera Letelier, a Chilean novelist.
It is a book I really enjoyed, not only because of its originality by also because Letelier has the gift to condense ideas, stories, characters and history to what we call in food "the perfect bite". A short description follows in order to (hopefully) open also your appetite!
In a small village in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where most residents work in nitrate mines, a charismatic girl unexpectedly takes on the role of a film narrator. People prefer to listen to her narrate and bring the films to life in front of them rather than watch them at the town's cinema, and they flock to her house to attend her homemade performances. Through the journey of the young narrator, we are transported to the arid landscape of the pampa, where life is harsh and stripped of any incentive to live it.
(Translated from the back of the greek book edition)
Having finished the book in less than two days (it is a rather small one), I tried to find other books of the novelist. Discovery of a writer you love its style is like discovering a new treasure! I managed to find (used), the book "Mirage of Love with Band of Musicians (1998)" (Fatamorgana του έρωτα με μουσική μπάντα) which was also amazing. A short description follows.
In a village of the Chilean Atacama Desert, a village without church, whose name does not appear on the region's maps, where mine workers go during the weekends to spend what they earned during the week in taverns, bars and brothels, an orchestra is formed, called the Band of the Liter, to welcome Chile's dictator on what is likely to be his first and last visit. In this remote land, at the ends of the world, human misfortune takes on a legendary character, and before being consumed by death, human beings are shaken by love, tenderness, and the thirst for justice.
(Based on the back of the greek book edition)
The Atacama Desert of Chile covers an area of 105,000 square Km and it rains there every one hundred years! Both books speak about the saltpeter mining towns, which were self-contained company towns centered entirely around the extraction and processing of saltpeter (caution: it is not salt pepper!). Saltpeter is a name used to describe potassium nitrate ($\text{KNO}_{3}$), used for gunpowder and sodium nitrate ($\text{NaNO}_{3}$) used in making agricultural fertilizers. These towns were created during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and then abandoned when artificial methods allowed the world to produce fertilizers and explosives chemically at a fraction of the cost.
It is funny in life, how sometimes different things come together to allow you to form a better picture. A couple of weeks ago, under the broad title "Learn a thing or two" in Cinobo, I saw the documentary poster "Nostalgia for the Light (2010)". It was a very interesting documentary about the ... Akatama desert, why it is a "must-go-to" place for astronomers, how a dictatorship used the area for its atrocities and about the different perspective of time from different disciplines!
