The President and the Frog by Carolina De Robertis: A review

 

What a pleasure this book was to read. I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to it for it had been in my reading queue for months but finally, I picked it up as my very last read of 2021 and it turns out it was a great way to close out the year. 

It is a short book at only around 220 pages so one could almost read it in one sitting if one had nothing else to do. Carolina De Robertis packs quite a lot into those few pages. She gives us the story of an 82-year-old man who is the former president of a South American country that is never actually named but is assumed to be Uruguay. He is about to be interviewed by a television journalist from Norway and as he waits for her he reflects on his life and on the part of it that he does not want to reveal to anyone. That secret part is his relationship with a frog.

As a much younger man, the former president had taken part in an attempted revolution against the autocratic government that was then in power. The attempt was unsuccessful and many of the revolutionaries, including him, were captured and imprisoned in solitary confinement for years. His cell for the first four years was a hole in the ground with a grate covering part of the top through which food was lowered to him each day and through which he was extracted from time to time for "questioning," i.e., torture. His only light came through that grate and his only companions at first were the spiders and bugs that found their way into his hole, but finally, another creature joined him there: a frog.

This was no ordinary frog. For one thing, he could talk. He was, in fact, a philosopher frog, a snarky and prescient frog, and he and the future president had many long conversations about life and its meaning. They talked about the quest for justice and dignity and what it means to love a country. Those conversations are full of irony and satire as they reflect on politics, on the disparities endemic in society, and the systemic racism that seems so hard to root out. Their conversations are sometimes funny, sometimes moving, but always insightful. And they are a secret that the ex-president has carried with him for more than forty years.

The interview with the journalist takes place in 2016 after the presidential election in the United States and that, too, comes up in the conversation. The ex-president marvels at the idea that a country could freely elect such an ignoramus to be its leader. 

This is the third of De Robertis' books that I have read after The Gods of Tango and Cantoras and I think it may be my favorite. It is very different from the other two books but it has in common with them her brilliant insights into what it is to be human. It is part historical fiction and part fable and she ties all of that together beautifully with masterful writing. The technique she employs is to flash back and forth through time as we witness the interactions with the frog who urges the man to dig deep and find "the One Thing" and the conversation with the interviewer who expresses concern about the ramifications of climate change and of the American election. The result of comparing and contrasting the two conversations is to give us a sense of the indomitable human spirit that finds hope and optimism even in the face of the grimmest reality.

It's difficult to adequately describe this novel. There isn't much of a plot and one can't really say it is character-driven. The "action" takes place entirely in the head of the main character, as we are privy to his thoughts and memories. It's not a book that everyone would enjoy, but I loved it and I'm just glad I finally got to it at the end of the year.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars  

Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis: A review

I read Carolina De Robertis's previous book, The Gods of Tango, and liked it quite a lot and so I was eager to read her new offering. 

The previous book was about a woman who was unable to fulfill her life's ambition to play the violin simply because she was a woman. So, after emigrating from her home country to Argentina and finding herself in difficult circumstances there, she ultimately made the choice to live as a man and play the violin for tango bands. The current book details forty years of the lives of five women beginning in Uraguay in 1977. These five women are lesbians who came together for friendship and support (and occasionally sex) in a hostile society. They were unable to be themselves, to live their lives openly and honestly. I think I am sensing a common theme in De Robertis's books.  

As a queer woman herself, it is likely the De Robertis has faced some of the prejudice and discrimination that the women in her novels have faced. Thus, she is perhaps fulfilling the prime directive for writers of writing about what you know.

"Cantoras," literally "women who sing," is, it seems, a Uruguayan term for lesbians. As a book title, I suppose it has a bit more resonance than "Lesbians."

The five cantoras of the novel are Flaca, Romina, Anita (aka La Venus), Paz, and Malena. The five take a trip together to an isolated and sparsely inhabited Uruguayan cape called Cabo Polonio. They set up in an abandoned shack on the coast and it becomes their sanctuary. In time, they come up with a plan to buy the shack and repair it to make it more habitable. It will continue throughout the years to be their safe place.

These are not rich women and they have difficulty coming up with enough money to buy the place, but Malena, the quiet one in the group, says that she will get the amount that they are short. And she does. None of the other women seem especially curious as to what she did to get that money.

They purchase the property in all of their names. They are to be equal owners even though some contributed more to the purchase price than others. Paz, who is still a teenager escaping from a home where she is misunderstood and unappreciated, has little money at all to contribute, but it was her idea to buy the place, suggested to her by one of the locals who had befriended her.  

Of the five women in the group, I confess I felt the most compassion and empathy for Paz and Malena. Although I certainly felt sympathy for the mistreatment by society of the other three women, I just didn't find their personalities to be particularly admirable or something that I could easily identify with.

In 1977, a military dictatorship was in power in Uruguay and it brutally crushed political dissent. The human rights of its citizens were disregarded and people were arrested without cause, locked away where their families couldn't find them, tortured, and sometimes disappeared altogether. Homosexuality was a crime to be ruthlessly punished, so it was in that atmosphere that these five women had banded together. Through the next forty years, they became each other's family and continued to support and sustain each other through all the trials of their lives, and through the serial affairs of each member. Some of the other partners in those affairs became like extended family. We see the evolution of Uruguayan society through these years until finally, Romina is able to marry her longtime companion and she is elected to political office, after being an activist for change for many years.

I wanted to like this book, and indeed, there was much to like about it, but I found that I just couldn't get into it in the way I had hoped to. Toward the end, I found myself rushing through, bored with all the mind-blowing sex and the repetitious odes to female friendship. It certainly was not a bad book, but it didn't live up to my hopes for it.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Gods of Tango by Carolina De Robertis: A review

This historical novel of the beginnings and rise of popularity of the tango could have been a conventional tale of a character's journey from poverty to - if not riches - at least comfort and security, but it is much more than that. 

The character at the center of the story starts as a teenage girl in the village of Alazzano in Italy. Her name is Leda, like the swan. She comes from a poor but respectable family. Her father is a consummate violin player and he teaches Leda's older brother to play. Leda wants to learn also but women are not allowed to play the violin. Women are not allowed to do many things in early 20th century Italian villages.

Nevertheless, Leda watches the lessons and learns the fingering of the instrument and all the motions of playing even if she is not allowed to handle it.  

Leda is pledged to marry her cousin, Dante. Dante emigrates to the New World, to Argentina, to make a new life. Argentina, at this time, has an open door policy for immigrants from Europe, at least partially to overcome the population of descendants of African slaves who threaten to become a majority in the country.

In time, Leda is married by proxy to Dante and leaves home on a voyage to Argentina to join him. Before she leaves, her father gives her the family violin as a present, he says, for Dante.

Leda arrives in Buenos Aires to learn tragic news: Dante has been killed, shot by the police in a labor demonstration. She is on her own in a strange city where she knows no one. How will this naive 17-year-old survive? 

She settles down in the crowded conventillo where Dante had lived, inhabiting his old room. She finds kindness among the other residents of the conventillo. She begins sewing with some of the women there in order to make enough money to live. Sewing is one of the few jobs respectable women could do. Other than that their options were to become a whore and earn their living on their backs or to find a man and get married and depend on him to provide. 

Leda soon learned that sewing would not earn her enough money to truly live independently. She had to make another plan. 

Since a woman was not allowed to work at a job that would support herself, Leda decides to be a man! She will become Dante, taking her late husband's name and wearing his clothes. She is a tall, slender woman which makes her gender-bending more feasible and more believable.

She abandons the conventillo where they know her, finds a room in another one and then a job in a cigarette factory. But all the time what she really longs to do is play the violin.

The tango phenomenon is just reaching its peak at this time and musical groups all over Buenos Aires play that music at cabarets and nightclubs, feeding the frenzy. If only Leda/Dante could find a way to become a part of such a group...

How she reaches that goal and what happens afterward make up the critical part of this story. It gives the novel a depth that it would not otherwise have and allows the author to explore the role of gender and the many ways that women were kept "in their place" and not allowed to be full participants in society. And though things have improved somewhat in the last hundred years, we still see these same attitudes and these same efforts to stifle women today.

There is also a secondary plot involving Leda's childhood friend, Cora, Dante's sister. The tentacles of this sad story reach out through a community that failed Cora and that continued to deny what happened to her, and all the way to Buenos Aires and later Montevideo where Leda/Dante finally understands what she saw in Alazzano as a twelve year old child. It is a tragedy that is all too familiar.

I found this entire story very affecting, very moving. I was on tenterhooks, fearing the worst for Leda/Dante throughout, but, in fact, though bad things happened, in the end s/he was able to live the life s/he chose - as a man. What a relief!

My rating: 5 of 5 stars