Carolina De Robertis's Blog, page 4

Flying to Norway

This afternoon, I’ll board a plane to Norway, the very first country to release my novel Perla, where we’ll be celebrating with a range of public events in Oslo. I’m truly and profoundly excited to share this book with a corner of the world that is so far from Argentina and Uruguay, where the book is set, and that has such a rich and graceful culture of its own.

The Norwegian cover of PERLA

Norway, of course, has made incredible contributions to global literature: Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, to name a few. And the Norwegians I’ve had the chance to meet so far have given me glimpses of a culture of kindness and gentle strength.

I’ll never forget what my Norwegian editor wrote to me after the tragic 2011 Norway attacks: “There are flowers and silence all over Oslo.” If more cultures responded this way to mass violence, surely our world would be very different.

Perla is a book about, among other things, how to live in the wake of tragic violence, and the possibilities for resilience, rebirth, and even love in such circumstances. What a humbling opportunity it is to share this book in Norway, and to not only present Perla, but to listen and learn as well.

PERLA’s publication: five week countdown

Perla will be released in the United States on March 27, exactly five weeks from today. In Norway, the book launches next week, and I will soon be flying to Oslo to celebrate with Norwegian readers. Even though this day has long been coming, it feels strange to suddenly feel it around the corner.

Novels are a long, slow affair. The idea for this book cooked for a year before I started writing it in earnest, in January of 2007. Since then, it has accompanied me through all the other changes in my life – including launching my first novel and becoming a mother. A novel demands that you work on it, and with it, over the years, growing alongside it, stretching your own limits to meet its evolving demands. You devote yourself to its invisible world, day after day, season after season. Few people, if any, see the fruits of your labors along the way. It’s like painting a secret mural on the back of an enormous building, where only you have access. Every day you get up and add paint to that gargantuan surface, brushstroke after brushstroke, for what seems like forever. Then somehow, at some time, you are finished, you submit the work into another’s care, and before you know it the building turns 180 degrees and your work is exposed to the street.

The exposure is both exciting and startling.

With Perla, I’ve been deeply moved to hear early readers talk about the way the book opens gates for them to discover recent Argentinean history, specifically the aftermath of disappearances and their intimate effects on families and the nation as a whole. These are stories, not only of pain, but of immense human courage, and of love’s survival against the odds – stories as universally resonant as they are particular. I have been honored to swim through these stories to write Perla.

Here are two recent starred reviews of Perla, both very kind, in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.

 

PERLA profiled in Library Journal

A very kind advance description of PERLA by Barbara Hoffert, an editor at Library Journal, as part of her picks among upcoming book releases for March 2012. A highlight: “Expect richly observed detail and real human drama from this award-winning author.”

Read the full review here.

The Invisible Mountain now available in Spain and Latin America

Planeta has published La Montaña Invisible in Uruguay, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, and Spain.
The author will be presenting the book in Uruguay and Argentina in late June and early July. Read more here.

PERLA, De Robertis’s second novel, to be published in March 2012

Rights have sold to Knopf (U.S.), as well as publishers in Germany, Italy, and Norway.

Read more here.