Making your summer reading list? You’re going to want to hear about this sexy new book:
GODS OF TANGO, by Carolina de Robertis, is a steamy story of music, migration, romance and identity. Leda, a young Italian bride, arrives in Buenos Aires to find out that her husband has died. In seeking herself in her new country, Leda becomes Dante, playing violin in one of the bands taking the scandalous tango from the brothels and tenements to the high-society cabarets. Carolina de Robertis is the award-winning author of The Invisible Mountain and Perla.
From de Robertis' website:
February 1913: seventeen-year-old Leda, carrying only a small trunk and her father’s cherished violin, leaves her Italian village for a new home, and a new husband, in Argentina. Arriving in Buenos Aires, she discovers that he has been killed, but she remains: living in a tenement, without friends or family, on the brink of destitution. Still, she is seduced by the music that underscores life in the city: tango, born from lower-class immigrant voices, now the illicit, scandalous dance of brothels and cabarets. Leda eventually acts on a long-held desire to master the violin, knowing that she can never play in public as a woman. She cuts off her hair, binds her breasts, and becomes “Dante,” a young man who joins a troupe of tango musicians bent on conquering the salons of high society. Now, gradually, the lines between Leda and Dante begin to blur, and erotic desires that she has kept suppressed reveal themselves, jeopardizing not only her musical career, but her life.
Richly evocative of place and time, its prose suffused with the rhythms of the tango, its narrative at once resonant and gripping, this is De Robertis’ most accomplished novel yet.
Carolina de Robertis will read from Gods of Tango at the Bay Area Book Fest, The Latino Experience as US Literature on Sunday, June 5th, 3:15 to 4:30 at the Marsh. For more information: www.bayareabookfest.org.
Listen now or Get MP3. 29:43 min
Click here to listen. 59:50 min
Also on today's show:
Erotic Integrity: How to Be True to Yourself Sexually by Claudia Six
Brooke Warner talks about She Writes Press
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