As much as this novel is a family saga, it is also a history of Uruguay from the early 1900s to the present. It depicts three generations of passionate, principled women: herbalist and grandmother Pajarita, poet and mother Eva and anarchist and daughter Salomé. Driven by deep-seated left-wing con...
This haunting novel begins in 1900, when many people in Tacarembo explained things to themselves by means or folk-tales or legends. It is a novel with three protagonists. The first one, Pajarita disappears as a baby and mysteriously reappears in a tree. It is left up to the reader to decide wheth...
I bought this book 4 years ago because I had heard it was a beautiful portrait of Uruguay and it's recent history. That is was. But The Invisible Mountain was so much more than that. I would call this both a spiritual and feminist novel. Told through three generations of women, Carolina De Robert...
Some of my favorite lines from the novel:"I felt both restless and paralyzed, yearning for motion yet unable to do anything ordinary such as open a book, cook dinner, call friends and meet them for drinks." (pg. 18)"I wrote this story for myself, in the depth of the night, spilling over beyond th...
This is one of the best books I've ever read. De Robertis is a powerful writer who tells her story so well, I couldn't put it down, even though it was very hard to read about the horrors she described in parts of the book. Something about the South American writers I've read (A Hundred Years of S...
On her last morning on board, she dressed with care and latched her trunk tightly so that nothing, no sleeve, no village dust, no errant memory could spill out when the porter came to carry it to the deck. Then she sat in silence for a while. Her bunkmate, Fausta, had left her bedclothes tousled ...
There was plenty to do. Funds to gather, and weapons, and members; banks and gun clubs to raid for supplies; copper wire to coil into a shape that holds without hurting. Salomé tried on every pair of handcuffs she made. She pulled her wrists against the wires, and if they left red slashes she kep...