Cantoras

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Thinking about Cantoras makes my breath shaky, and when I breathe in, I feel like bawling all over again. Several times while reading, I found myself wanting to go back and highlight and annotate everything it was that gorgeous. In the 1970s and ’80s — decades before a new regime legalized gay marriage — communists, activists and social outcasts demanded their freedom. Prawo oficjalnie nie ściga osób homoseksualnych, ale kto by się tu przejmował prawem, gdy do więzienia można trafić za zorganizowanie domówki? What if so much living made you dangerous,” thinks Romina, a young Uruguayan activist eager to fight the brutal military dictatorship that took power on the eve of her sexual awakening.

The opening paragraphs are omniscient; we’re on the outside, watching something incredible take flight. Carolina de Robertis weaves a flawlessly, richly, and dare I say, passionately told story, an ode to female friendship, love, and sexual identity, along the backdrop of a beautiful, tiny country whose inhabitants are suffering in turmoil, yet simply trying to live their truths. It tells a story, about women in a grim time, that one feels couldn’t have been told until Carolina De Robertis came along. And it tackles what it means to live, survive, and belong to each other and to a land that’s far older than the soldiers and the generals who try to redefine it and soil it.Jedna z nich, mężatka, która zostawiła w Montevideo rodzinę i wybrała życie w lesbijskiej utopii, jest nim wyraźnie zaskoczona - “obracała to słowo w myślach. Yes, I've been made to cry by a sad book a few times, but few books have made me weep literal tears because I was so happy for a character. This book resonated with me deeply, the main reason is that these women’s stories could be my story too.

They’d been forming a kind of family, woven from castoffs, like a quilt made from strops of leftover fabric no one wanted. It is forbidden to copy anything for publication elsewhere without written permission from the copyright holder. And yet Romina, Flaca, Anita “La Venus,” Paz, and Malena—five cantoras, women who “sing”—somehow, miraculously, find one another.I feel especially connected to Paz for her introversion, love of both literature and physical exertions.

Carolina De Robertis' writing is so lush and gorgeous and really lends itself to creating the beautiful refuge of Cabo Polonio, from the rocky shore to the little shack that the women find solace in. There are a lot of imageries throughout the story, mainly music (cantora), ocean (Cabo Polonio), and fire (stars). If you would like to get caught up in the lives of five resilient, flawed and endearing characters and learn some of Uruguay’s history along the way, then this is the perfect story for you! My idealized visions were impossible, of course, since this is a novel about the harsh realities of dictatorship, prejudice, and the ways we can hurt the ones we love. Perhaps for a related reason, a brush with a real-life Nazi feels shoehorned in, a harrowing story that deserves to be fully realized, not a plot twist.Bohaterki powieści urugwajskiej pisarki mówią o sobie, że są “cantoras”, “śpiewaczkami”, choć wcale nie mają na myśli śpiewaczek. Explore the linguistic and syntactic decisions De Robertis makes as she narrates instances of actions of the oppressive authority. In what ways do the beach and the shack fulfill a different need for each woman while still proving their common need to be themselves? The story opens with the five women—Flaca (21), Romina (22, Jewish), Anita/La Venus (27), Paz (16), and Malena (25)—traveling to Cabo Polonio from Montevideo for the first time in 1977.