The Invisible Mountain by Carolina de Robertis

“An incantatory debut…This visionary book beautifully, bravely breaks open all the old secrets.”—Lisa Shea, Elle

From the verdant hills of Rio de Janeiro to Evita Perón’s glittering Buenos Aires, from the haven of a corner butcher shop to the halls of the United States Embassy in Montevideo, this gripping novel—at once expansive and lush with detail—examines the intertwined fates of a continent and a family in upheaval. The Invisible Mountain is a deeply intimate exploration of the search for love and authenticity in the lives of three women, and a penetrating portrait of the small, tenacious nation of Uruguay, shaken by the gales of the twentieth century.

On the first day of the year 1900, a small town deep in the Uruguayan countryside gathers to witness a miracle—the mysterious reappearance of a lost infant, Pajarita—and unravel its portents for the century. Later, as a young woman in the capital city—Montevideo, brimming with growth and promise—Pajarita begins a lineage of fiercely independent women with her enamored husband, Ignazio, a young immigrant from Italy and the inheritor of both a talent for boat making and a latent, more sinister family trait. Their daughter, Eva, a fragile yet ferociously stubborn beauty intent on becoming a poet, overcomes an early, shattering betrayal to embark on a most unconventional path toward personal and artistic fulfillment. And Eva’s daughter, Salomé, awakening to both her sensuality and political convictions amid the violent turmoil of the late 1960s, finds herself dangerously attracted to a cadre of urban guerrilla rebels, despite the terrible consequences of such principled fearlessness.

Provocative, heartbreaking and ultimately life-affirming, The Invisible Mountain is a poignant celebration of the potency of familial love, the will to survive in the most hopeless of circumstances, and, above all, the fierce, fortifying connection between mother and daughter.

Carolina De Robertis was raised in England, Switzerland, and California by Uruguayan parents. Her fiction, nonfiction, and literary translations have appeared in ColorLines, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Indiana Review, among others. She is the recipient of a 2008 Hedgebrook Residency for Women Authoring Change, and the translator of the Chilean novella Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is at work on her second novel.

Visit Carolina de Robertis’s official website and meet her on her book tour.

From our Q&A with the author:

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.”

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