Hsinju Chen's Reviews > Cantoras

3rd read: Jul 3, 2021
Buddy reread again with Gabriella! This is our third read (yes), and there are still little details we noticed for the first time. The writing and story and imageries are just as beautiful, the characters just as complex and lovable. It feels warm to spend time with the cantoras again. Also, I cried again, but this time, from joy.

2nd read: Dec 21, 2020
For the audiobook review & 2nd read thoughts, see here.

1st read: Nov 19, 2020

“I think you know how to love.”

You know the question people like to ask: if you were only to read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be? I never had an answer; never, until today. I’d gladly read Cantoras a thousand times over; I’d hug this book to my heart forever if I could.

The story opens with the five women—Flaca (21), Romina (22, Jewish), Anita/La Venus (27), Paz (16), and Malena (25)—traveling to Cabo Polonio from Montevideo for the first time in 1977. This beach, relatively untouched by the Uruguayan regime, becomes the cantoras’ refuge for years to come.

[Paz] hadn’t known air could taste like this, so wide, so open. Her body a welcome. Skin awake. The world was more than she had known, even if only for this instant, even if only in this place.

Written in stream of consciousness narrative, Cantoras flows perfectly, weaving between the present and the past, and from person to person. The writing is breathtaking; the five women, connected through their identities, their shared desire for freedom amidst the suffocation in the era, are distinctly beautiful. The ocean sings, the waves unconfined; the cantoras deserve freedom, too.

Flaca (La Pilota), Romina, La Venus (because she is La Venus to me and never Anita), Paz, and Malena. They are the very definition of a found family. Over the years, their love for each other shifts and reforms, their dynamics fierce and strong. And their names. Whenever I read their names, my heart jumps as if I were reunited with long-lost friends. Perhaps I am. Over the course of the book, we grew to understand them like close friends, and there is something intimate about that. I feel especially connected to Paz for her introversion, love of both literature and physical exertions. Also maybe because she started out as a baby gay, stealing my heart.

They’d been forming a kind of family, woven from castoffs, like a quilt made from strops of leftover fabric no one wanted. They wanted each other. They had to stay woven. They would not fray.

There has never been another book that hit me so hard, that I cried and sobbed because I personally felt connect to all of the characters, not just the five cantoras but all of them. My heart broke for them as they suffered and soared when they were free. I’ve gripped the fabric of the shirt on my chest so many times I couldn’t tell if it was my fingers clenching or my heart.

I think the most surreal thing is that the plot wasn’t really surprising because De Robertis depicted all the characters so perfectly, it was clear how they’d react, what they’d do, and they are like your stubborn friends whom you love so much but could do nothing about to change what they were going to do. How could things not have happened the way they did? I knew what was coming, but that didn’t make anything hurt less; it made everything more emotional because I connected with all the characters and every flash of pain felt like losing a friend in life. It literally felt like a part of myself had been slaughtered and I have no better way to put it. I laugh with them when they are in joy because I am incredibly happy for them, and I am always thrilled when they find freedom. My heart might not survive another emotionally intense experience because what they’ve been through, I feel like I’ve been through, too.

There are a lot of imageries throughout the story, mainly music (cantora), ocean (Cabo Polonio), and fire (stars). I think everything is about desire, freedom, and love. Cantoras has gutted me yet also made me so happy; I didn’t know it was possible, to be both exhilarated yet pained, to weep in sorrow and joy at the same time.

Now here [Romina] was again, suspended in her own desire as if desire didn’t live inside you at all but instead it was you who lived inside your desire, as if a woman’s wanting could be oceanic, vast enough to be swum, to be submerged in.

Thinking about Cantoras makes my breath shaky, and when I breathe in, I feel like bawling all over again. I will never lean against another doorway without thinking of Paz and Flaca, or look at rocks at the ocean without being reminded of Romina and Malena. And the prose is so precise, I am sure De Robertis wrote it in the way words were invented for. I think I’ll be listening to the audiobook version soon, or reread it immediately because I cannot stand not having Flaca, Romina, La Venus, Paz, and Malena in my life.

content warnings: homophobia, sexism, infidelity, government censorship, torture, abuse (cigarette burns), rape, sexual assault, pedophilia, loss of family, alcohol abuse, forced hospitalization (conversion therapy), electric shock, suicide, blood, miscarriage(view spoiler)[, death of prominent character (hide spoiler)]

Buddy read with Gabriella. Check out her incredible review here.