Interview with Carolina De Robertis
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Interview with Carolina De Robertis [00:00:09] Kendra Hello, I'm Kendra Winchester, here with Autumn Privett. And this is Reading Women, a podcast inviting you to reclaim half the bookshelf by discussing books written by or about women. Today we're talking to Carolina De Robertis about her book CANTORAS, which is out now from Knopf. [00:00:24] Autumn And don't forget that you can find a complete transcript as well as a list of all the books we mentioned in today's episode linked in our show notes. And be sure to subscribe so that way you don't miss a single episode. And review us in iTunes. [00:00:36] Kendra Well, this book was recommended to us by Lupita on our most anticipated episode, and I am so glad that we picked this up so soon. [00:00:47] Autumn It is just as immersive and beautifully written as she said it would be. [00:00:52] Kendra Yes. In my mind, I was so excited for it, but nervous. But I shouldn't have been because it definitely delivered, and it's such a beautiful book. [00:01:02] Autumn I don't know how writers are able to write such melodic books. I just don't know. It's just, I mean, I guess it's awe inspiring to me. [00:01:13] Kendra I will definitely be going back and picking up a lot of her backlist. [00:01:18] Autumn Well, so on that note, Carolina is a writer from Uruguay, which is where this book is set. And she, as Kendra just mentioned, has written three other books THE GODS OF TANGO, PERLA, and THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAIN. And her books have been translated into seventeen different languages, and they've appeared on the best books of the year. They've been recommended by Oprah Magazine, Booklist, NBC, and she has been the recipient of a Stonewall Book Award as well, in addition to other fellowships and awards. So she is a very prolific, highly praised writer. She mentions this in the interview, but she's also a translator. Which is cool. And right now she teaches fiction and literary translation at San Francisco State University and lives in Oakland with her wife and her two kids. And yeah, so CANTORAS is her fourth novel, and we were so excited to talk to her about it. [00:02:16] Kendra So without further ado, here is our interview with Carolina De Robertis. Well, welcome, Carolina, to the podcast. We're so excited to have you on. [00:02:27] Carolina Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted. [00:02:29] Autumn This book first got on our radar from the lovely @lupita.reads. And as we were talking a minute ago, she basically demanded that we read it. And we're so glad she did because this is just a beautiful, lovely, well-written, immersive story. So we were delighted to read it and excited to talk to you about it. [00:02:51] Carolina Oh, thank you, so much. I'm just incredibly honored and pleased, more than I can say, by some of the early readers' reactions. I'm so glad. And thank you for taking the time. [00:03:03] Kendra Yeah, I know I was just saying before we started recording that I've been in a book coma since I finished it this past weekend. And it's like I've been wandering through different other books, and I'm like, No, they just don't work. I just can't get over it. Obviously we loved it. But for listeners who haven't read CANTORAS yet, would you describe it for them? [00:03:22] Carolina Sure, yes absolutely. So CANTORAS is a novel that takes place in Uruguay, which is my native country, a little country in South America. And it follows five queer women, beginning in 1976—so in the era of the very brutal military dictatorship—as they discover each other, come out to each other, and then over the years turn to each other and their friendship for love and survival. So it follows them through the era of the dictatorship and also into time of democracy and looking at all of the, not only political, but also personal upheavals and experiences that they traverse together. [00:04:03] Autumn And the title is so integral to the story, and you kind of get into this a little bit at the very very beginning of the novel. But could you talk a little bit about the title and where that came from and the role it plays in the story? [00:04:15] Carolina What is interesting about that is that I had many different working titles along the way as I was writing the book. And the title CANTORAS actually didn't come until the end. And yet it is so incredibly central to the story itself. So the word CANTORAS is a kind of old-fashioned word for "singers" in Spanish, and it also means "female singers." So implied in the word is that these are all female people, which of course is an untranslatable part because if you translate the word to "singers," it's accurate, but it doesn't capture that piece of "this is about women." And this is a word that was used by at least a few different crews of queer women who really truly did live under the radar during the dictatorship in Uruguay and who used that word as code for "lesbians." So they'd sort of look at each other and go, you know, "What do you think? Is she a cantora? Does she sing?" You know, wink wink. And so this is a word that I learned from these real women I met in Uruguay, beginning in 2001, as I was traveling there to deepen my own relationship to my country of origin and and also just kind of as a young, queer woman from the diaspora, looking for signs of queer life in my country of origin. And I met these women who are a generation older than me and had lived through these times of incredible repression and found these dazzling ways to survive. And I was just blown away, and I've basically been listening to their stories and gathering their stories for eighteen years, and I'm so inspired even by things like that. Like that little example of using the word "cantoras" to have code for what we are and for finding each other, even in dangerous circumstances. [00:06:03] Autumn It doesn't surprise me that you actually talked to women and were in Uruguay when you were writing this because it is so—I mean, I feel like I was there—it's so immersive, just the experience of reading this book. But apart from the on the ground research you did, what was your research process like? Where did you decide to start? And what did you look at as you were researching for this book? [00:06:33] Carolina That's a great question, and what's interesting is that with regard to this particular book, which is my fourth novel, by the time I knew I was definitely going to write this novel, I had strangely enough done most of the research in terms of the knowledge about the dictatorship era, what it was like, political imprisonment, how things happened, how democracy returned. I had researched all of that very deeply for my prior novels, which also kind of delve into this subject matter from different angles. And so I had a lot of the material. I have shelves of books, you know, in the original Spanish, dog-eared, secondhand copies. I have them, and I've been looking at them. So I kind of already had all of that to build on, which is really exciting and refreshing as opposed to setting out on a topic and then realizing you're going to have to take this deep research dive. Right? Which is also lovely but much more laborious. And then in terms of researching the stories and the queer stories themselves, which I didn't find at all in history books, that has just not been part of the official history within Uruguay at all. Which was part of what was so mind blowing for me about meeting these women. And then alongside, having relationships and friendships with them whenever I could go back to Uruguay, spending time particularly with a couple of them and hearing them talk about their friends and their memories and their past. It was really incredible to put that together with the immense silence around queer women and queer peoples histories within that era of Uruguay and realize you know there are just so many stories that are historically in the margins and that just get under told. And you know my hope as a novelist is to fill those silences with voice as best I can. And then once I knew that I was going to write this novel, that it was going to be a novel, I went back to some of these women. And I told them, and I asked them if I could possibly have their permission to draw on their stories, which they gave me the most open-arm blessing, which was so moving. And then I also asked whether I could interview them.