Cantoras: A novel

by Carolina De Robertis

"Cantoras is a stunning lullaby to revolution—and each woman in this novel sings it with a deep ferocity. Again and again, I was lifted, then gently set down again—either through tears, rage, or laughter. Days later, I am still inside this song of a story." —Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award–winning author

From the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of The Gods of Tango, a revolutionary new novel about five wildly different women who, in the midst of the Uruguayan dictatorship, find one another as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family.

In 1977 Uruguay, a military government crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In this environment, where the everyday rights of people are under attack, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression to be punished. And yet Romina, Flaca, Anita "La Venus," Paz, and Malena—five cantoras, women who "sing"—somehow, miraculously, find one another. Together, they discover an isolated, nearly uninhabited cape, Cabo Polonio, which they claim as their secret sanctuary. Over the next thirty-five years, their lives move back and forth between Cabo Polonio and Montevideo, the city they call home, as they return, sometimes together, sometimes in pairs, with lovers in tow, or alone. And throughout, again and again, the women will be tested—by their families, lovers, society, and one another—as they fight to live authentic lives.

A genre-defining novel and De Robertis's masterpiece, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit. At once timeless and groundbreaking, Cantoras is a tale about the fire in all our souls and those who make it burn.

• ISBN10: 0525521690
• ISBN13: 9780525521693
• Publish Date: 3 September 2019
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Alfred A. Knopf
• Format: Hardcover (Deckle Edge)
• Pages: 336
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780525521693

Reviews

[nannah]

“Cantora” is now an old-fashioned word in Spanish meaning singer, but it has another (also old-fashioned) meaning: a woman who is attracted to other women. In this novel spanning four decades, five cantoras find each other under a Uruguayan military dictatorship, form a close friendship, and inspire future cantoras.

Content warnings:
- pedophilia, child grooming, and CSA (also discussed in this review)
- cheating
- rape
- electroshock “therapy” and torture (described in painful detail)
- nazism
- suicide (also described in painful detail)
- homophobia
- casual cissexism
- biphobia

Representation:
- almost every character is Uruguayan
-one of the five MCs (Romina) is biracial and Jewish
- every MC is sapphic; all but one (La Venus, who’s bisexual) is gay

Carolina De Robertis’s writing is consistently beautiful, even if it’s also exhaustingly long-winded. The story’s focus is less on its plot (which is light and slow) and more on the five central characters themselves, their interactions with each other, and their interactions with the two major settings: their city and Cabo Polonio, the beach where they first vacation to and become a tight found family.

I’m not much bothered by the sluggish pacing or the wordy writing--especially when it’s this lovely--but the dialogue does become a little stilted. But then again, I think the book suffers the most when it vanishes altogether. I was so surprised at the amount of backstory in the second half, and that’s saying something, because I was also surprised at the amount of backstory present in the the first. But the first act is told through each main characters’ alternating PoVs in what I'd describe as being fairly “immediate” when compared to the better half of the second act, which consists almost entirely of summaries.

There is also character “development” that happens completely off page; for example, Paz, the youngest of the main five, ages the most dramatically in the time skip from the first and second act because she's sixteen at the beginning of the book--and she becomes almost unrecognizable. This change isn’t summarized, either. She’s just changed. But maybe this is something that’s common in fiction that spans multiple generations, and because that’s not a genre I read very often, it's strange to me.

Okay, but I have to give compliments where compliments are due: trauma is handled extremely well. The majority of these characters have their own trauma, each unique, each painful, each handled superbly. Even when I kind of wish it wasn’t, like with Paz, who was groomed by an adult when she was about thirteen years old. On one hand, I’m amazed at how realistic and unbiased the author handled this situation, because Paz herself doesn’t see what happened to her as abusive. She sees it rather as a kind of lesbian awakening, largely due to the way she was groomed, while her (adult) friends are horrified by what happened to her. Though I wish Paz’s opinion changed when she got older (because if not, that could be how those situations happen again, but with Paz in the opposite role), I admire the way the risk taken here.

I also appreciate how the author made it so the novel never really picks sides or has biases when it comes to fights between the main characters--especially when these fights are about things like cheating, things that usually do pick one side. It never becomes a morality lesson or a character blatantly preaching to another. So I appreciate that, even though personally I have such strong feelings about it that it was difficult to sit through the fights without wanting the book to take sides.

There were a few other things that bothered me, like some over-the-top descriptions of certain characters that go on and on, the biphobia, and the almost fetishistic descriptions of the indigenous Guaraní character, but overall this was a beautiful and heartbreaking book I'm glad to have read.