Carolina De Robertis

From a Q & A with Carolina De Robertis about her new book, The Invisible Mountain:

Q: When did you first have the idea to write The Invisible Mountain and was there a particular event or idea that was its genesis?

A: Books often begin out of the need for a text that does not yet exist. It is difficult to pinpoint a single moment when this book began. Though it took eight years to write, the search for it started many years before.

I began as a gatherer of stories. When I was twelve, my father told me all the stories he knew of our family, reaching back to great-great-grandparents in Italy. He was going through a personal crisis, spurred by his own father's death. My grandfather had been a distant, eminent parent, and my father had spent his whole career trying to emulate him, only to learn upon his death that he had written his children out of his will. Years later, my father would repeat history by disowning me for not conforming to his views—but for now, he poured out stories, hoping that one day I would turn them into a book. He chose me to tell, rather than my siblings, because, he said, I was the one most like his mother, the poet, who was said to be crazy, and who always loomed enormous in our family as the prototype of what an artist is and what a woman should never be. I listened to the stories and carried them inside me like radioactive seeds.

When I was thirteen, I managed to find Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, and others who exploded open new universes of what a story could be, and how it could be told. My fate was sealed as both a very nerdy teenager, and a person indelibly in love with the written word. But over the years, I couldn't find one thing I was looking for: a novel that could open the gates to Uruguay, a country at the root of me, that I knew little about, and yet that was essential to knowing who I was. In my mid-twenties, I became obsessed with the idea of writing a book about Uruguay, as a way of understanding this country I hungered for and longed to know; I awakened to the possibility of writing my way back into a heritage I'd lost. I didn't have to look far for a place to begin: the seeds had been waiting for years.

The novelist Annie Dillard has said it beautifully: “There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

Q: Are any of the characters in the novel based on your own family? Is there a particular character in the novel that interested you most? Or with whom you most identify?

A: Although......[read on]

Visit the website of Carolina De Robertis.

--Marshal Zeringue