The entire novel makes for a poetic read, with De Robertis penning effortlessly lyrical sentences. As the author chronicles Leda’s transformation, the book sometimes switches to the perspective of a minor character, making for a richer but still-cohesive narrative that describes the lives of a working-class Argentineans. Leda, posing as Dante, catches the ear of a fairly successful band leader, who recruits her for his group. So she decides to don her dead husband’s clothes and take his name, finding a job at a cigarette factory and playing tangos on her heirloom violin at night. When she arrives and finds that Dante has been killed, Leda resolves to make her new life work but is disheartened when she realizes that prostitution is the only avenue open to unmarried women without means. The story opens as Leda leaves the small Italian village of Alazzano to make a new life in Buenos Aires with her cousin Dante, to whom she is promised in marriage. (Mar.De Robertis’s beautifully written third novel (after Perla and The Invisible Mountain) follows the trajectory of Italian immigrant Leda Mazzoni, who lives as a man in order to support herself in Argentina circa 1913. 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. This ambitious narrative, largely told in flashbacks, is propulsive and emotionally gripping. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Perla by carolina de robertis