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In her most recent book The President and the Frog, Carolina De Robertis helps us to see the world as strange as it is, again. We are taken into the home of the former president of an unnamed Latin American country, where he has invited journalists to discuss his legacy and democracy’s present hard times. He has endured much to attain democracy for his country, and his reputation as an imprisoned freedom fighter has become almost myth. As he speaks with the journalists gathered around him, he wonders whether to tell the secret of his survival during those long years of confinement: a frog. Illuminating a reality as strange as it is humane, The President and the Frog is a timely evocation of what humans have endured and can endure to attain a dream, and how luminous the path taken sometimes is.
I spoke with Carolina De Robertis about history, the source of a book’s form, a future filled with queer joy, and frogs.
Jordan Silversmith
Did you feel that your approach to writing The President and the Frog differed at all from how you wrote prior books? If so, how?
Carolina De Robertis
Each of my novels has had its own utterly unique journey. One different element with The President and the Frog is that, by the time I started writing it, I’d not only been dreaming on it for years, but I’d already spent eighteen years researching the Uruguayan revolutionary and dictatorship eras for other novels, starting with my first book, The Invisible Mountain. Although I did do plenty of research particular to this project, I also had this rather remarkable experience of cumulative gathering over almost two decades, which included not only reading and listening but also obsessing, writing, and thinking about that era, the era in which I was born and which, as a member of the Uruguayan diaspora, holds a kind of root-power for me. Drawing on research felt like drawing water from a very deep well.
Jordan Silversmith
How did the idea of writing about this come to you, and how did you get it all the way to a novel?
Carolina De Robertis
The President and the Frog takes its spark from a real-life former president of Uruguay, José Mujica, who endured over a decade of brutal political imprisonment during the country’s dictatorship, only to transform years later into an international beacon of hope. I lived in Uruguay during part of his presidency, and during that time, in 2013, I read a brief mention in a newspaper that, when asked how he survived the worst of solitary confinement—and not only survived, but found the strength to emerge as a leader—Mujica mentioned having talked to (or domesticated) frogs. This detail stayed with me. It became a bright seed. I longed to hear the conversations between a frog and this man in the bleakest possible circumstances, who thought he was broken but would go on to do extraordinary things. I couldn’t shake the idea that those conversations might hold some secret crucible for themes relevant to the human spirit.
Jordan Silversmith
Throughout your novels, you have experimented with a variety of forms, tones and techniques. Was there anything in particular that informed how you approach writing this book?
Carolina De Robertis
For me, structural and aesthetic innovations in a novel should always arise from the DNA of the book itself, from the core of what it wants to become, rather than being imposed on the work because I want to try out a new strategy. As a result, each project takes shape with its own style, voice and inner architecture—which I find to be part of both the challenge and exhilaration of writing novels. This book called for a distillation, a narrative compression, that was different from anything I’d written before.
For inspiration I looked to short novels I’d found breathtaking, as well as books where conversations are the engine of narrative or where fantastic elements illumine social realities—including Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Miriam Toews’s Women Talking, Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Home, Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, and many more. A novel is like a lake, nourished by the streams and rivers of many books.
Jordan Silversmith
Did you have a particular audience in mind, whether extant or some idealized, potential audience, for this book?
Carolina De Robertis
I set out with the vision and hope of writing this book as a love letter to anyone who’s ever felt despair. That’s what I wrote in my journal, years before I started.
Audience for a novel is mysterious, at once porous and permeable. On the one hand, it’s a deeply democratic form: anyone literate can open a book, and enter. I appreciate and embrace that about novels, their capacity to speak to readers across human experience. On the other hand, we could think of intended audience as composed of concentric circles, with the primary audience at the center, and everyone else welcome in the outer circles. My primary audience for my last novel, Cantoras, was queer people: I intentionally wrote from a space free of the straight cis gaze. For this book, my primary audience is those who have known suffering, both personal and political, as a result of the inequities of this world, who dream of a world where everyone is safe and free—which means a world without white supremacy and patriarchy and climate devastation—and who are seeking sources of sustenance on that long road. These are my people. I wrote a book for us.
Jordan Silversmith
It seems obvious to ask, but how did writing a book about someone imprisoned in a room reverberate with you during the pandemic?
Carolina De Robertis
What’s interesting about this one is that I finished writing this book in late 2019, before the pandemic began. By the time I was editing, though, it was 2020 and the pandemic was in full force. I’m glad I had the chance to revisit the text from that perspective, finding moments that felt prescient as well as places where I could tune the manuscript toward resonances with the world we live in now. Isolation and uncertainty are huge parts of this protagonist’s journey, and these are themes that are all too familiar and relevant to us today.
Jordan Silversmith
Was the frog there from the beginning?
Carolina De Robertis
Yes! In fact, the book was born from that one scrap of news about Mujica mentioning the role of frogs in his surviving solitary confinement. Without that, I’m not sure I would have been brazen enough to embark on a novel inspired by a real-life former president of Uruguay. The frog gave me a portal into the story, in two ways. First, the narrative focus and containment made a vast thematic landscape approachable, gave shape to the exploration of hefty themes. Second, the burning question of what could have happened with the frog was singular, different from the prisms through which other writers or historians or artists might approach this public figure’s legacy. Sometimes the Muses send us something weird, like a signal no one else is getting, because it’s you through whom the story needs to come into the world.
Jordan Silversmith
There is something almost surreal to this history that challenges our perceptions as fine-tuned by reality. What do you think was the most difficult aspect of getting this story down on paper?
Carolina De Robertis
Trusting the weird. This can be one of the great challenges of writing fiction: to allow ourselves to sink into the previously unarticulated spaces and dimensions where the narrative or the language needs to go. We fear being misunderstood, and this tempts us to play it safe. One writing rule of thumb I live by is “Don’t be afraid to turn up the weird dial.” Once, as I was rereading Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I think it was the fourth or fifth time, it occurred to me that she really trusted the weird to create that book. And it’s one of the most transcendent, brilliant, and masterful novels ever written in the English language, as well as one that could not be more socially urgent. Morrison showed us—well, thousands of things, and I will spend the rest of my life at the foot of her majestic accomplishments, in awe. But one thing she showed me, with Beloved, among the many, is the vast potential of that which can be perceived as weird. It can tap into deeper places in our private or collective consciousness; it’s not a mere distraction from reality, at its best, but a dive into reality’s hidden heart.
Jordan Silversmith
Do you have any idea what’s next for you?
Carolina De Robertis
I spent much of the past year just trying to keep my head above water and my family safe and alive. As a full-time professor with two school-age children who were home around the clock, and a multigenerational household that includes my wife and elder mother-in-law, lockdown left me—like many writers raising children—bereft of writing time. But we survived, which is what matters, and for which I’m enormously grateful. I’m happy to say I’ve now embarked on a new project, set in a very different context than I’ve ever written about before. I can’t say much about it yet, except that it is full of queer joy. I’d like to write a novel with enough queer joy in it to light up a whole city. We’ll see how that goes.
FICTION
The President and the Frog
By Carolina De Robertis
Knopf Publishing Group
Published August 3, 2021
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