The Invisible Mountain

by Carolina De Robertis Narrated by Christine Avila

Overview

On the first day of the millennium, a small town gathers to witness a miracle and unravel its portents for the century: the mysterious reappearance of a lost infant, Pajarita. Later, as a young woman in the capital city - Montevideo, brimming with growth and promise - Pajarita begins a lineage of fiercely independent women. Her daughter, Eva, survives a brutal childhood to pursue her dreams as a rebellious poet and along the hazardous precipices of erotic love. Eva's daughter, Salomé, driven by an unrelenting idealism, commits clandestine acts that will end in tragedy as unrest sweeps Uruguay. But what saves them all is the fierce fortifying connection between mother and daughter that will bring them together to face the future.

From Perón's glittering Buenos Aires to the rustic hills of Rio de Janeiro, from the haven of a corner butchershop to U.S. embassy halls, the Firielli family traverses a changing South America and the uncharted terrain of their relationships with one another.

Editorial Reviews

In a small town in a Uruguay, the first day of the year 1900 opens auspiciously with the reappearance of a missing infant. That young girl, Pajarita, becomes the first in a lineage of three gifted, stubborn, spiritual women. With each new generation, these women search for personal fulfillment, in love, political activism, or poetry. Stretching over 90 years and several South American countries, this family narrative is imbued with both an autobiographical feel and a keen sense of place.

Publishers Weekly

The history of Uruguay through the 20th century sparks personal tragedies amid political intrigues and cultural upheavals in this enchanting, funny and heartbreaking debut novel. Three generations of women populate this sweeping saga: Pajarita, the miracle child who at the dawn of the new century disappears and then reappears in a tree, born twice, as the residents of her small town say; Eva, Pajarita's daughter, who suffers a cruel childhood and learns to spin her painful experiences into a new life of art and adventure as a poet; and Salomé, seduced by communism and nearly losing everything fighting for the cause she believes will save her country. This novel is beautifully written yet deliberate in its storytelling. It gains momentum as the women's lives spin increasingly out of control while Uruguay sinks into war, economic instability and revolution. An extraordinary first effort whose epic scope and deft handling reverberate with the deep pull of ancestry, the powerful influence of one's country and the sacrifices of reinvention. (Aug.)

Kirkus Reviews

Miracles, poetry and guerilla fighters march through the 20th century in De Robertis' winning debut, a beautifully wrought novel of Uruguay. On the first day of every new century, the village of Tacuaremb- witnesses a miracle. Jan. 1, 1900, brings a baby found in the treetops; as she flies down to the arms of her grandmother she also finds her name: Pajarita, little bird. A few years later, Venetian immigrant Ignazio Firielli falls in with a troupe of magicians touring the countryside. He is thunderstruck by Pajarita, marries her a few days later and sweeps her off to Montevideo. Ignazio begins wandering, drinking, whoring and gambling their money away, so Pajarita supports their children by mixing herbal remedies, first for the women of her neighborhood, then for the whole city. When their daughter Eva is ten, Ignazio takes her out of school to work in a shoe shop, where the owner regularly rapes her in the storeroom on top of the shoe boxes. She finally escapes to La Diablita, a restaurant filled with revolutionaries and writers, and decides while waiting tables there to become a poet. Eva moves to Buenos Aires with her childhood friend Andres, but he mysteriously disappears. She meets and marries Dr. Santos, who introduces her to a life of ease in a city dominated by the Perons and their promises. Eva gives birth to Roberto, Salome (whose delivery is aided by Ernesto Guevara) and hundreds of poems; when Argentina becomes too dangerous to write, love or breathe in, she returns with her children to Montevideo. There she encounters a woman named Zola, who turns out to be Andres after surgery, and the two fall in love. The final section follows Salome and her involvement with theTupamaros, a revolutionary faction that attempted to overthrow Uruguay's dictatorship. Tortured and imprisoned for years, Salome returns to freedom and a transformed Montevideo in the novel's heartbreaking closing pages. Dense and lush, filled with lyrical storytelling. First printing of 150,000. Author tour to Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

From the Publisher

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

An O, The Oprah Magazine 2009 Terrific Read
A San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year

“An incantatory debut. . . . [A] sweeping and lushly lyrical saga that spans three generations of women. . . . Boldly poetic. . . . This visionary book beautifully, bravely breaks open all the old secrets.”
—Elle

“A galloping saga. . . . Its ensemble of women and men [are] bent on living every moment as if on fire. . . . The kind of novel you stay up late to finish.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle

“Beautifully told with rich details and a plot that is finely woven. . . . Pulls you in from the first page and holds you until its last.”
—Dallas Morning News
 
“Passionate. . . . De Robertis has created a vivid new landscape, both internal and external, and provided the reader with a glimpse of the country of her ancestry, a land haunted by a mountain that is not really a mountain.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Marvelous. . . . Carolina De Robertis brings to vivid life the history and culture of Uruguay. Bold, passionate, and filled with songs both ecstatic and tragic, The Invisible Mountain tells the stories of three generations of women whose lives transcend the ordinary.”
—Cristina García, author of Dreaming in Cuban
 
“The brainiest dynastic novel in years. A high-end story full of sex, politics and family.”
—Sara Nelson, The Daily Beast
 
“Stunning. . . . The Invisible Mountain has the body of an epic and the soul of a sassy, sexy storyteller.”
—Paste

“Deeply engrossing. . . . This novel makes us ponder the struggles of our own grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, and gives us the compassion to recognize that the links between us are deeper than the differences. A fierce, wise, and tender tale.”
—Anita Amirrezvani, author of The Blood of Flowers
 
“Enchanting, funny and heartbreaking. . . . An extraordinary first effort whose epic scope and deft handling reverberate with the deep pull of ancestry, the powerful influence of one’s country and the sacrifices of reinvention.”
—Publishers Weekly, (starred review)
 
“With grace, fluidity and a modicum of magic, an extraordinary and passionate family navigates the social and political landscapes of South America. The Invisible Mountain is a wonderful story; and De Robertis is a writer to watch.”
—Matthew Aaron Goodman, author of Hold Love Strong
 
“De Robertis is a skilled storyteller, but it is her use of language—from the precision of poetry to the sensuality of sex—that makes this literary debut so exceptional.”
—Booklist (starred review)
 
“Carolina De Robertis is a writer of uncanny wisdom and an alchemist of words. . . . A gifted literary voice mapping the uncharted territories of the Americas in a fearless new way.”
—Alex Espinoza, author of Still Water Saints
 
“A poetic and absorbing generational epic that pays tribute to a colorful culture and amazing history. De Robertis is a promising young writer, and we can only hope there is much more to come from her.”
—BookPage
 
“Beautifully wrought. . . . A winning debut.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“A haunting novel about an extraordinary family and an evocative tribute to the endurance of women and the spirit of poetry.”
—Diana Gabaldon, author of The Outlander series

APRIL 2010 - AudioFile

This sweeping narrative traces one family's story through the lives of four generations of strong, independent women in Montevideo, Uruguay. They survive and thrive during the two world wars, exile, revolution, and personal triumphs and tragedies. Spanish words and phrases are sprinkled throughout the story, keeping the South American setting in high relief. Christine Avila adds authenticity to her narration with her perfect pronunciation and timing. While there’s little differentiation between characters, Avila skillfully weaves the story of the four women, each of whom has her own story while sharing common themes with the others. The only distraction from this well-told novel is when Avila slips into a distinctly American accent for the Spanish-speaking characters. E.N. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172166426
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/25/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Pajarita
 
Montevideo, Uruguay, 1924: Pajarita grew up in the country and first arrived in the city as a seventeen-year-old bride. Now, her husband has not been home for days, leaving her alone with three small children and a house that has run out of food. Her friend Coco, the butcher's wife, has come over to visit.

"First of all," Coco said, pushing a hefty package into Pajarita's hands, "you're taking this meat. I don't care what you say. I know your husband's gone—the desgraciado." She sat her ample body down at Pajarita's table. Pajarita stared at the gift.
   
"I have no way to thank you."
   
Coco continued as if she hadn't heard. "Secondly: your plants. They're strong. You should sell them."
   
"Sell?"
   
"To women in the barrio. You can start in the store, behind the  counter with me. Look, once word spreads about your cures, better than  a doctor and cheaper too, you'll be putting food in those boys' bellies." It had never occurred to her, but she couldn't think of a reason not to try. She took her children and a basket of leaves and roots and barks to the butcher shop. The boys resumed an epic pretend game of gauchos-in-the-campo, riding imaginary horses among the chunks of flesh that hung from the ceiling. In one corner of the room, between the chopping block and meat hooks, Pajarita arranged two small wooden stools and sat down on one. Ignazio, she thought, I want to kill you, to kiss you, to carve you like a flank; just wait and see how I'm going to live without you by my side.
   
Coco served as a living advertisement. Women began to come. Some of them just needed to be heard; they told sprawling, unkempt tales of  death in the family, brutal mothers-in-law, financial pressures, wayward  husbands, violent husbands, boring husbands, loneliness, crises of faith,  visions of Mary, visions of Satan, sexual frigidity, sexual temptation,  recurring dreams, fantasies involving saddles or bullwhips or hot coals.  She offered them teas for comfort, luck, or protection. Other customers  came with physical conditions—pain in their bones, a stitch in their  side, numbness in hips, ears that rang, forgetfulness, sore knees, sore  backs, sore hearts, sore feet, cut fingers, quivering fingers, wandering fingers, burns, headaches, indigestion, excessive female bleeding, a pregnancy that wouldn't come, a pregnancy that had to end, cracked bones, cracked skin, rashes no doctor could diagnose, aches no doctor could cure. There were housewives, maids, sore-handed seamstresses, sweaty-handed adulteresses, great-grandmothers swaying with canes, young girls swooning with love. Pajarita listened to them all. She sat still as an owl as she listened. Then she handed them a small package and explained what to do with its contents. Word spread. Women came to see her from all corners of the city. She could barely keep up with harvesting from cracks in the sidewalk, nearby parks, and the pots in her own house. To Coco's delight, the seekers often picked up their daily beef along with their cures. Pajarita set no price. Some gave her pesos, others fruit, a basket of bread, a ball or two of handspun wool. Anonymous gifts appeared on the Firielli doorstep—baskets of apples, jars of yerba mate,handmade clothes for the children. They had enough.
   
She had developed a peculiar sort of fame. Her name was whispered through the kitchens and vegetable stands of Montevideo. Pajarita, she cured me, you should go see her too. And when I almost. You saw me then. If it hadn't been for her. Strange, she thought, that all of this should grow from something as familiar as plants, such ordinary things, opening new worlds, drawing the souls and stories of this city to her doorstep, unveiling a startling thing inside her: a reach, a scope, adventures with no road map, forays into the inner realms of strangers where she roved the darkness in search of something that bucked and flashed and disappeared, slippery, evasive, untamable.
   
One sweltering afternoon, as a hunchbacked woman who smelled of garlic confessed her infatuation with the new priest, Pajarita felt something stir inside her body. Her mind reached in to feel. She was pregnant. A girl. She filled with the memory of conception, that final night, the clawing, Ignazio's torn and hungry skin. And he was gone. She almost imploded from the sadness.


Eva
 
Montevideo, Uruguay, 1938: Eva is thirteen years old. After two years of working for a shoe salesman who abused her, she has rebelled against him and her parents, found a job in a fashionable café, and begun to spend her evenings with a group of aspiring poets.


Months and years would stretch and turn and she always pined for this: these nights; smoky, electric, succulent, ineffable; the feel of the red table under her hand (chipped and glossy, sticky underneath) as the poets dreamed and joked and boasted; the way the air stretched and shimmered after her second glass of wine; the conversations that coiled intricately through war to recent essays to the deepest meaning of life. A light shone through those nights that Eva could not define, that vanished if she sought it too directly, that gilded everything it touched—voices, faces, wineglass, table, words—with numinous honey. She grew to rely on it, trusting its power to ward off all that must be kept away—drabness,
boredom, nightmares, the rage of home, the terror inside shoe stores and of Nazis in faraway lands. She was free inside its unseen sphere, and life became more possible. Surely the other poets felt it too: Joaquín, with his meticulous verses, knotted forehead, and arsenal of freshly sharpened pencils; Carlos, who smelled of shoe polish and stole moments at his father's law firm to scrawl odes on legal files; the Well-Known Poet, with his amiable laugh and unkempt gray hair; Pepe, with his pointy chin and fast martinis; Andrés, with his lucid voice, sharp thoughts, sharp smile; and Beatriz, the kind of girl whose laugh poured like molasses, whose poems brimmed with maudlin nubile shepherdesses yearning for their errant gaucho men. Eva could have borne her poems if she did not also sit so close to Andrés.
   
"We're changing the world, right, Andrés?" Beatriz said, twirling her hair on a slow finger.
   
"Poetry alone won't change the world," Andrés said. "But without it, where would we be? Stripped of mystery, passion, everything that urges us to stay awake despite the shit and pain of living. In a world full of war, we need it more than ever."
   
Joaquín and Carlos murmured their agreement. The Well-Known Poet nodded behind his cigarette smoke. Andrés' words mixed with the smoke, swirling around the table, imbibed on each poet's breath. In a world full of war. Eva felt the smoke and bulk of the Admiral Graf Spee within those words. It had been only a month since the German battleship had dragged its huge hard broken body into the port, seeking refuge, trailing fire and smoke and the toxic scent of battle. Uruguay was neutral. Uruguay was far from Europe. Uruguay had not been invaded the way Poland had last spring. But the Graf Spee came anyway, and so did the British ships that set it on fire. War's fingers were very long and they stretched over the Atlantic and shook up her city the way a ghost's cold fingers reach through a window and shudder you awake in your own bed. That's how it was when Eva woke to Papá in the hall telling Tomás about the Graf Spee: the smoke was thick like—well, like—a big black blanket, all over the port, and up on the crane we were coughing like crazy, and I saw the Nazis standing on deck rigid like fucking toothpicks, like everything was fine, like they were breathing air from the fucking Alps. After the German captain gave up and sank his battleship to the bottom of the river, Eva dreamed of dead wet Nazis smashing her windows and crawling into her bed, cold and dripping, cutting her with shards of glass and ship and with their fingernails.
   
Andrés had written a sonnet called "Graf Spee's Ghost" and it occurred to her that he might understand. She tapped his foot with hers. He smiled without looking at her.
   
"The things you say," she told him later on their walk home. "The way you say them. Everybody listens."
 
"It's just talk."
   
The heart of things, you touch it when you speak; somehow you shake and shift the flesh reality is made of. "It's more than that."
   
They walked home together every night, but never all the way to the door. They did not want to be discovered. Eva came to dread buying the family meat, because of the way Coco pinned her with doleful eyes. "What happened to that son of mine? You, Eva, tell me! He barely even lives here anymore."
  
 We are told, Andrés wrote, that the world is made of burlap: / Coarse, enduring—when really it is gauze, / Layer upon layer, fine, fragile, infinite, / We can see our fingers through it in the light.


Salomé
 
Montevideo, Uruguay, 1966: Salomé is fifteen years old. She has watched the nation become increasingly repressive, as well as admired the Cuban revolution from afar. Her best friend, Leona, has just led her to a clandestine meeting.


They entered a cramped dark room with no windows. Four people sat inside: Leona's sister, Anna, with her long face and gold-rimmed glasses; a young man in a starched collar; another man in his late twenties with a square face and bushy beard; and a broad, large muchacho with hair that wisped into his face, who looked older than Salomé, about seventeen. He looked familiar, but she couldn't place him, couldn't think, because they all were staring at her.
   
Leona motioned for her to sit down. Salomé arranged herself carefully on the freezing floor, regretting that she'd rushed out in her knee-length school skirt. She tasted the mingled breaths of six people and two oil lamps.
   
Bushy Beard nodded toward Leona, who closed the door.
   
"So," Bushy said, "you're Salomé."
   
She nodded. All eyes were still on her.
   
"She can really be trusted?"
   
Leona's nod was decisive.
   
Bushy stared at Salomé. His eyes were dark green, shaded by a ledge of brow. "What do you know about the Tupamaros?"
   
She cleared her throat. So here it was. "They plan to liberate Uruguay."
   
"Where did you hear that?"
   
"In the papers—"
   
"The papers are much less favorable."
   
"And my family talking."
   
The wisp-haired boy grinned and now she placed him, the grandson of Cacho Cassella, the magician from Abuelo's youth. Tinto Cassella. He winked at her in the low light.
   
Bushy continued. "What do you think about the Tupamaros?" She had rolled that question through her mind all day. "That they're important. And brave."
   
"What would you say to a Tupamaro if you met one?"
   
She saw Leona in her peripheral vision, lifting her chin, leaning forward, and Salomé could almost smell the eucalyptus, feel the stippled light of their lawn. " 'I admire what you're doing and I want to be part of it.' "
   
Bushy Beard was impassive. "What if that Tupa told you that liberation is only achieved by action—including force, when necessary?"
   
That was when she saw the guns. They almost blended into the dark walls: rifles in the corner, a pistol at Anna's knee. She'd seen guns before, on policemen, in soldiers' hands, in photos of the Cuban Revolution—but never so close, and not in the lap of a university girl, not within reach of a man giving her a test. Her body felt like a cup full of crushed ice, so tight and cold. But guns, of course, were necessary, weren't they? A dirty need that you don't want but can't ignore, like defecation. She thought of Che, luminous Che, embracing a sleek rifle in his sleep. The air hung thick, unventilated, pressing.
   
"I'd agree."
   
Bushy Beard leaned closer. "How old are you?"
   
"Fifteen."
   
"You understand what's being asked?"
   
"Yes."
   
"You don't think you're too young?"
   
"No."
   
He stroked his beard. He glanced around the room. "Any comments?"
   
Tinto raised his hand. "I know her. Our grandparents are friends. She's a good person, reliable."
   
Leona added, "I would trust her with my life."
   
"That's good," Bushy Beard said. "You may have to. Any concerns?" The room was silent.
   
"All in favor?"
   
All the members raised their hands. Leona hugged her tightly. "Welcome, friend."

 

Videos