Perla

Starred review from January 30, 2012
Following her successful fiction debut, Invisible Mountain, De Robertis tackles the lingering repercussions of the state-sponsored disappearances of political dissidents that characterized Argentina’s late-1970s dirty war. In March 2001, while 22-year-old Perla Correa’s parents are on vacation, a naked man, smelling like “fish and copper and rotting apples,” materializes in her living room in an affluent Buenos Aires suburb, and Perla finds herself drawn to him. Over several days, he recalls the life he shared with his pregnant wife—a life that ended when he was abducted more than two decades earlier. As she listens, Perla laments her recent breakup with a kindhearted journalist who suspected that she herself might have been stolen from disappeared parents, a possibility that Perla has never wondered about, or “more accurately, I had, but the wondering barely left an imprint on my conscious memory, it had been as rapid as a blink.” Perla neglects her friends and studies to spend time with the stranger, whose stories speak to her long dormant search for identity. She struggles for truth as she sorts through the shards of Argentina’s shattered history, piecing together the painful fragments that may rightfully be hers. This ambitious narrative, largely told in flashbacks, is propulsive and emotionally gripping. De Robertis’s lyrical flights are grounded in the fulfillment of the most desperate wishes of disappeared parents and their children, culminating in a wrenching catharsis about rebirth and healing.

February 1, 2012
The ghost of Argentina's Dirty War quite literally haunts a woman whose father supported the junta's brutality. Perla, the narrator of the second novel by De Robertis (The Invisible Mountain, 2009), is a young university student who's spent much of her life keeping a dark secret: Her father was a naval officer who during the late 1970s and early '80s helped round up the "disappeared," dissidents who were arrested and executed by the military regime, often dropped into the Atlantic Ocean from airplanes. That dark history has shaped her friendships and complicated her romantic relationship with a journalist investigating the Dirty War. But that legacy becomes unavoidable to her when a man appears in Perla's home, soaked and dank-smelling and constantly thirsty. He's a ghost of one of the disappeared, but also quite real: The water that he can't shake off soaks the apartment. His surreal presence unlocks a host of memories for Perla, and the novel alternates between her perspective, as she recalls her difficult relationship with her father, and the stranger's perspective, as he recalls the horrific rapes and other abuses he suffered while in military custody. The tone is mournful, but the book is as much romance as tragedy: De Robertis favors long, luxurious sentences that help give the novel a sense of uplift. That style makes for a few fecund, overwritten passages, but on the whole the story is remarkably convincing: The ghost is an effective metaphor for the history Perla's family can't suppress, and De Robertis is clearly attuned to the afteraffects of the dictatorship on contemporary Argentina, where it still fills books, newspapers and TV reports. We are products of our times, she means to say, but past history isn't necessarily our destiny. An elegantly written and affecting meditation on life in the wake of atrocity.

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October 1, 2011

During Argentina's Dirty War, a period of military repression lasting from 1976 to 1983, some 30,000 citizens were "disappeared"--including about 500 pregnant women whose newborns were given to military families. This story is at the heart of De Robertis's second novel, after the international best seller The Invisible Mountain. The daughter of an icy mother and upright naval officer father, Perla Correa learns from a pushy houseguest just how she figures in the tragedy of the Dirty War era. Expect richly observed detail and real human drama.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2012
Historically based on a recent, dark chapter in Argentina's history, De Robertis' latest novel centers on Perla Correa, a university student and daughter of a decorated naval officer in Buenos Aires. Having learned young that her powerfully loving father was on the wrong side of an unpopular regime, Perla, with the knowing confidence of a bright psychology student, has long repressed shame and guilt for the part she must intuit that her father played in displacing the nation's d'saparecidos: thousands who vanished and were never heard from again. In the book's opening pages, Perla is surprised by a mysterious, dripping-wet intruder who has appeared in her living room without opening a door or dislocating a windowpane, a strange guest who can't initially speak and asks only for water, which he chews hungrily. As the man discovers where he is and remembers where he has come from, water seeps from his skin, and Perla is drawn to tenderly care for him without, at first, understanding why. Lyrically combining into reality both the fantastic and the horrific, De Robertis weaves a beautiful and plain-faced tale about birth, rebirth, and the responsibility of inheritance from complex, startling history. High-Demand Backstory: The author's debut novel, The Invisible Mountain (2009), was an international best-seller and an O, The Oprah Magazine 2009 Terrific Read. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)