I mean, I do believe that we're also writing about the time in which we live as we write. 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.

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.” 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).

Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The strength of this story is it's dream-like quality.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. You couldn't play the disappeared man from the past who turns up in the living room without him looking like a zombie. If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be? With the impersonation it could have sounded like theatre - this was a less tangible story that took shape in my head in a very personal way. But after a while I didn't mind and the voice and style of reading actually went with the content book. It's true that all the characters sound the same, it's not read by an actor who impersonates the different people. It took me a while to get used to the reading. What aspect of Carolina De Robertis’s performance might you have changed? Poetic and visual, potently emotional without being trite. The past happens to be personified and not 'factual' and to me that's a bonus.Īs per above - the idea of the past returning as a missing person. Whether you call it magical realism or whatever - this is a story about the past returning to the present and trying to make peace with it. Unlike the other reviewer I didn't mind at all that a dead man/ ghost turned up in a living room. I was really moved by the way a political story about Argentinia's disappeared was told so beautifully and I loved the language. Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?Ībsolutely.

Perla by carolina de robertis