Carolina De Robertis
“Novels arise from burning questions. They are born from an urgent need to explore what we want to know, and, if not to ever fully understand, at least to swim outward, beyond ourselves, for there is no other artistic genre more uniquely suited to transport us into the skin and consciousness of our fellow human beings, and this is one of the reasons novels have saved me, so many times, not only as a writer, but as a reader.”
“The President and the Frog is a story about stories, and how to remember the seeds we can be even in the bleakest times. There is such lucid tenderness in the book, but it is also wild, and funny. As we move through time, we return again and again to love, to growth, but through struggle, and madness, and yes, magnanimous conversations with a frog. This book and Carolina De Robertis’s vision are a beautiful, shattered dance.”
“Exceptional . . . [The President and the Frog] is a hopeful, entertaining paean to language, justice and perseverance.”
“It’s impossible not to fall in love with these fierce ‘girlwomen’—queer, courageous, and adventurous—as they find freedom in their relationships with each other while living under a ruthless dictatorship.”
“Brazenly hopeful . . . The great success of this novel is that it shows how tyranny, even if you can hide from it by living a quiet life, is a thief of joy and love. De Robertis’s precise, chilling insight into the daily agonies of life under a dictatorship rivals Ariel Dorfman’s . . . Cantoras is bold and unapologetic, a challenge to the notion of ‘normalcy’ and a tribute to the power of love, friendship and political resistance. It’s a revolutionary fable, ideal for this moment, offered with wisdom and care.”
“Sweeping and utterly breathtaking . . . Aside from the consistently engrossing narrative that effortlessly interweaves the story of each woman’s personal successes and setbacks with Uruguay’s complicated struggle to come into its own as a democratic republic, De Robertis’ writing is reason alone to read this book. Like her fierce characters, her words pry and pull at the essence of not only what it feels like to be thwarted, condemned or quarantined because of your beliefs and identity, but also what it means to be a vulnerable yet empowered, infinitely beautiful and fully alive woman. Often, these sentences hit their target so directly and eloquently that they practically sing.”
A writer of Uruguayan origins, Carolina (Caro) De Robertis’ most recent novel is The President and the Frog (Knopf, 2021), which the New York Times called “a moving, deeply felt novel.” They are also the author of the novels Cantoras (Knopf, 2019), a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and a New York Times Editors’ Choice; The Gods of Tango (Vintage, 2016), winner of a Stonewall Book Award; Perla (Knopf, 2012); and the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain (Knopf, 2009), which received Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. They are also an award-winning translator of Latin American and Spanish literature, and editor of the anthology Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times (Vintage, 2017). In 2017, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts named De Robertis on its 100 List of “people, organizations, and movements that are shaping the future of culture.”
In an interview with NPR, De Robertis was asked about writing Cantoras as historically based fiction: “When we write historically based fiction, we're writing with a double consciousness. I mean, I do believe that we're also writing about the time in which we live as we write. And although I wrote this to be very particular to a certain period of Uruguayan history and a particular repressive era, I was aware of the fact that I'm writing in the Trump era and that these questions about how does it affect you as you walk down the street, as you live your life, to know that you're living in a space where the government is hostile towards your very existence? How do you live radiantly in a time and place where the world seems bent on your erasure? These are the questions that I was exploring for these characters, and I hope they have resonance for those of us who are sitting with those questions in the here and now.”
De Robertis teaches at San Francisco State University, and lives in Oakland, California, with their wife and two children.
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