“Most importantly, work. Work and keep on working. Art is not just something that happens; it’s something you MAKE happen.”
Richard Blanco
Carolina De Robertis: From Uruguay with Love
Carolina De Robertis: From Uruguay with Love
Award-Winning Novelist: Gods of Tango, Perla, The Invisible Mountain
Best 10 Books for a First Novel by Booklist, Recipient of Italy’s Regium Julii Prize
2012 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship
Translator, Faculty, MFA, Literary Translation, Creative Writing Department at
San Francisco State University
More than a courageous author, Carolina De Robertis has braved rejection from her Uruguayan family of origin. In 2002, when De Robertis married a woman, African-American filmmaker Pamela Harris, her parents cut her out of their lives. Becoming pregnant and bearing two children did not soften her parents in any way. “In fact, they dug their heels in even more. I suffered what Sarah Schulman has called, ‘familial homophobia,’ and had to mourn my parents, grieve the loss as though it were a death, though my parents are both alive.” When her father’s siblings tried to approach Carolina’s father to encourage him to mend relations, he responded by cutting off contact with them.
De Robertis is of many countries, yet an outsider in all of them. Born in England in 1975 and raised in England, Switzerland and the US by Uruguayan parents, she always has an “insider-outsider perspective, a double lens, if you will.” She identifies as queer—very much so, yet is also married with children which can be seen as ho-hum suburban, picking the kids up from school and taking them to Kung Fu.
A self-described bookworm, De Robertis always had her “nose in a book” all her life. “One of the ways I became a reader was in Switzerland, between the ages of five and ten, I was ostracized by classmates and teachers—so I devised a way to survive. Reading gave me a freedom and world expansion that never left me. I just love books. I love language. I love people. Novels—I’m fascinated by people and in love with humanity. I am a curious mix: I love to be alone in a room and love to go out in the world and talk, especially about books.”
Carolina De Robertis is an international sensation. Bestselling author of three novels, The Gods of Tango, Perla and The Invisible Mountain, De Robertis has garnered praise from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, Library Journal, Booklist, O, The Oprah Magazine, and the Washington Post, to name just a few. De Robertis’ debut novel, The Invisible Mountain, was winner of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Book of 2009, named one of the Best 10 Books for a First Novel by Booklist, and recipient of Italy’s Regium Julii Prize and a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages, and she has translated Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai, made into a feature film, and Roberto Ampuero’s The Neruda Case, from Spanish to English. Junot Diaz calls De Robertis “an extraordinarily courageous writer who only gets better with every book.”
She is working on a fourth novel, set in Uruguay. She keeps returning to the Rio de la Plata, that river plate that divides Argentina from Uruguay. Her grandmother was an Argentinian poet and her father an Argentinian scientist. Both migrated to Uruguay at various times for various reasons. Her first novel, The Invisible Mountain, traced three generations of Uruguayan women and built the story around a mystical myth of the appearance of purple berries at the altar of a church in 1800. It was a story of succulent and perfectly ripe berries, enough to feed the town twice over. The priest collapsed: “’He just turned white, white as paper, then he went pink, and his eyes rolled into his head “he collapsed onto the ground “It was the smell that was too much for him. You know. Like the smell of a woman who’s been satisfied. El pobre padre. All those nights alone – he couldn’t take it, those berries hot from the sun, in his church, too much for a priest.’” De Robertis invokes the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the poetic sensuality of Pablo Neruda in one breath.
While The Invisible Mountain was very much a story told in the magical realism of South America, Perla, De Robertis’ second novel, was told in the modern realistic vein of transforming historical events into stories told by pivotal characters. Perla, the son of a military leader who orchestrated the Desaparecidos, The Disappeared, during the dark years of Argentina’s military dictatorship between 1976-1983, exposed by the mothers and grandmothers in the Plaza de Mayo, is the story of discovery and anguish. De Robertis writes, “Sometimes, to hide your sadness, you have to cut yourself in two. That way you can bury half of yourself, the unspeakable half, and leave the rest to face to the world.” She sometimes felt this way, especially in her early twenties, when she was breaking away from her parents, taking huge risks, in a lot of pain.
As for being in the closet, De Robertis has always felt “it’s harder to be in the closet, than out of the closet. In fact, it’s intolerable to live in the closet. To hide, being your full self. Not everyone has a choice: they may not be safe out of the closet.”
In Perla, De Robertis spares no one in her effort to make beauty out of suffering. In life, in fact, De Robertis was a rape counselor for ten years and heard more than 1,000 stories of trauma and suffering, but also heard of resilience and triumph, an incredible part of the human story. It was this human spirit revealed that allowed De Robertis to do that work for so long.
In her third novel, The Gods of Tango, De Robertis evokes the character of Leda, a seventeen-year-old immigrant from a small village in Naples who arrives in Buenos Aires in 1913, only to find that her cousin/fiancé, Dante, has been murdered. Left to her own devices, at a time when women survived as either seamstresses in sweat shops or as prostitutes, Leda becomes Dante, a cross-dressing man. He goes out at night with his grandfather’s violin and joins a Tango orquesta. Little did De Robertis realize more than five years ago when she began writing Gods of Tango just how topical the subject of cross-dressing and transgender would become with the coming out of Caitlin Jenner.
De Robertis steams up the pages of her third novel with sex scenes that are so intimate, so revealing:
She “let her hands and mouth lead the way, to the nape of Alma’s neck, the arms, breasts, waist and neither of them made a sound just as two tango dancers move without a word, shut up and let your body do the speaking like this, this, this “she made sounds as though she were fighting something back – a jaguar, a shark, a sword of joy. Then, she lost the fight, and as sensation stabbed her Dante held fast to Alma’s hips to keep her own mouth fused in place as she’d learned to do with Mamita, accompanying the storm, swallowed by it, lit up in every centimeter of her body.
In describing her process, De Robertis said, “It was an extraordinary risk to embark on this book, but once an idea takes hold of me, I can’t write anything else. I’ve learned in fifteen years of novel writing – the voice of the book that wants to be written through you; the sooner I can get out of my way; move past fear, the better things go,” De Robertis said. In spite of the rather racy scene, it was not scary to write; it was thrilling and exciting to write, rather, as there is an incredible dearth of true real writing of sex between women.”
De Robertis gives voice to gender awakening when she describes how Dante feels:
Sometime in those years, the Shift occurred, though Dante would never be sure of the exact moment, just as one can’t know precisely where the river ends and the great Atlantic begins: but one day he simply
