The Movie Teller

María Margarita, a young woman who lives in a mining town in the heart of the Chilean Atacama desert in the 1960s, has had the gift of telling movies since she was a child.

When a film starring Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper or Charlton Heston, or a Mexican feature packed with songs, arrives in the local village cinema, the exact change for a ticket is collected at María’s house and she is sent to watch it. When María returns from the cinema, she tells the movie to her father, confined to a wheelchair, and to her four siblings, and soon she is telling the movie to a large and impatient public.

Through this tender story, Hernán Rivera Letelier gives us the magical tale of village cinemas in their times of splendor - and of decadence.

Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

HERNAN RIVERA LETELIER grew up and worked for many years in the saltpeter mines of Atacama, in northern Chile. His novel La Reina cantaba rancheras (Queen Isabel Sang Rancheras) catapulted him to fame, turning into one of the most widespread literary works in recent Chilean fiction. Two years later, he won the National Book Award again. His most well-known novel La contadora de películas (The Movie-teller) has been translated into 19 languages and is now a major motion picture directed by Lone Scherfit. In 2001, Rivera Letelier was named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Literature by the French Ministry of Culture and in 2019, he received the Yasnaya Polyana Prize for El arte de la resurección (The art of resurrection).