Ardiente Paciencia, or El Cartero De Neruda, is a 1985 novel by Antonio Skármeta. The novel was published in the English market under the title The Postman. It tells the story of Mario Jiménez, a fictional postman who befriends the real-life poet, politician and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, and is set in the years around the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The novel is based on the motion picture Burning Patience [es] of the same author released in 1983, and it was turned into another movie in 1995 as Il Postino, directed by Michael Radford. It was also turned into an opera, Il Postino, by Daniel Catán, with Plácido Domingo portraying Pablo Neruda (premiered at the Los Angeles Opera, 2010).
