The President and the Frog: A novel - Hardcover

De Robertis, Carolina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593318412 ISBN 13: 9780593318416

Verlag: Knopf, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

A "sublime and gripping novel ... about hope: that within the world's messy pain there is still room for transformation and healing" (Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Circe), from the acclaimed author of Cantoras.

“In the president’s excruciating (and sometimes humorous) encounters with his strangely healing frog ... De Robertis daringly invites us to imagine a man’s Promethean struggle to wrest control of his broken psyche under the most dire circumstances possible.” —The New York Times Book Review

At his modest home on the edge of town, the former president of an unnamed Latin American country receives a journalist in his famed gardens to discuss his legacy and the dire circumstances that threaten democracy around the globe. Once known as the Poorest President in the World, his reputation is the stuff of myth: a former guerilla who was jailed for inciting revolution before becoming the face of justice, human rights, and selflessness for his nation. Now, as he talks to the journalist, he wonders if he should reveal the strange secret of his imprisonment: while held in brutal solitary confinement, he survived, in part, by discussing revolution, the quest for dignity, and what it means to love a country, with the only creature who ever spoke back—a loud-mouth frog.

As engrossing as it is innovative, vivid, moving, and full of wit and humor, The President and the Frog explores the resilience of the human spirit and what is possible when danger looms. Ferrying us between a grim jail cell and the president's lush gardens, the tale reaches beyond all borders and invites us to reimagine what it means to lead, to dare, and to dream.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS is the author of five novels, including The President of the Frog, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, as well as Cantoras, winner of a Stonewall Book Award and a Reading Women Award, and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages and she has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Baldwin-Emerson Fellowship, Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize, and numerous other honors. An author of Uruguayan origins, she teaches at San Francisco State University, and lives in Oakland, California, with her wife and two children.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Once upon a time, in a near-forgotten country, on a certain mid-November afternoon, an old man sat at his kitchen table and listened for the world beyond. No cars, not yet, only a breeze rattling the windowpane and the song of a single stubborn thrush. The reporters would be here any moment, with their arms full of equipment and their heads full of questions, looking the way reporters usually did in the old man’s house: amazed, disoriented, as if they’d just landed in some unmapped corner of the planet. As if it were some miracle, him in a ramshackle home, as if—and this was the part that tickled him most—as if he were a normal man. It was strange, how stunned they were, no matter how thoroughly they’d researched and prepared, no matter how much they already knew about the so-called Poorest President in the World, a man who’d led his country while living in a place, well, like this, could it be true, this house right here, there must be some mistake, they’d pulled up to the wrong gate, it couldn’t have been these four walls that he chose over the Presidential Palace, how could anyone run a country from a humble farmhouse at the edge of town, more hut than house by the standards of some of the countries from which they’d flown; why would anyone even attempt to lead from such a place, why for that matter would anyone donate more than half their salary to charity, especially as president. There had to be a reason other than what the public had heard so far. And so they often opened with questions about it, tinged with disbelief as well as an amusing kind of hubris, as if they really thought they were the first to ask, as if by asking they could dig up some truth so buried it had never seen the sun. 


A common first question was why? Why live the way you do?


There had been so many interviews throughout the presidency, and even now that it was over. He’d thought it would abate once his term ended, but the requests had not let up. He’d had to become more discerning, but still, he wouldn’t stop. Not yet. Not until he had to. Because there was so much, always, left to do. He watched a few specks of dust dance in a slant of light, just above the cluttered kitchen counter. So much dust. He’d wiped all the counters this morning—not under all the jars and bottles and cups that congregated exuberantly there, but still, he’d wiped around them, and he’d swept the slightly uneven floorboards, yet here they were again, specks of dust, floating languidly as if time belonged to them.


An engine outside. He approached the front door. Yes, there they were, out at the gate. A van. Two of them this time, a man and a woman, from Germany, or was it Sweden, he couldn’t remember now, his calendar was so full they’d all started to bleed together and in any case a welcome to them all. These two seemed young, limber, they were busy disembarking and gathering equipment and hadn’t yet seen him in the doorway. The spring air was lovely, the warmest so far, that kind of November sun that flirts with your skin, coy about the summer to come. A good day for an interview in the garden. He’d suggest the garden, politely, but really that was the only place; usually, with two of them and the camera to set up on a stand, there wasn’t enough space in the combined kitchen and attached living room, and anyway they were never satisfied by the interior light, no sweeping vistas here, ha, not even close, nothing like the majestic windows and fancy molding in the official Presidential Residence of his own country, or of countries he’d visited as head of state, but despite that or, more accurately, for that very reason, he knew they’d want to see the inside of his house and get their own footage, direct images of—look, can you believe it, breaking news—the way an old man lives, and really, he thought to himself, regardless of what they say that’s all you are, an old man.

The reporter said something to the cameraman, then looked up and caught the ex-president’s eye. She smiled with genuine pleasure and waved. She was wearing sneakers, no high heels, a sensible and poised woman in her early forties perhaps, older than the cameraman with his broad shoulders and shaggy hair and a look about him like one of those surfer types who seemed to always long for the bobbing waves while she looked more like, say, an elementary school principal, warm and eagle-eyed. There were interviews and then there were interviews, and this reporter, he realized, watching her start up the path toward him, would not be one of the predictable ones who lingered in the shallows. She might not be the kind to start with that common question, the one about the house, the way he lived, that Why. She might start at the end, or in the middle, with the disastrous recent election in North America, a catastrophe only just beginning to send its ripples into the world along with questions surely on the tips of many journalists’ tongues, such as how the hell do we carry on? what will it mean? what now?—or maybe she’d start all the way back in prehistoric times, his guerrilla years, his prison years, perhaps that other popular question, which was how? How did you survive it and become, well, ehm, you? A kind of dive right into deeper waters, she’d be capable of that, the smart ones often took that route, thinking it gave them more time to burrow around the ocean floor in search of secrets to pry open. As if secrets were the pearls inside of oysters, held in crusty shells and he himself was a crusty old geezer after all, so why not. They fancied themselves pearl divers, the kind you read about in other countries who knifed down and tapped on shell after shell. There was a name for them, what was it, he couldn’t remember, not the first word to slip his mind this week, damn it, but what could he do, at least he was still sharp enough for a lot of things and, in any case, whatever they were called that was how they did it, the pearl people, tapping with their fingertips, while reporters went about it with their questions.


Tap tap, what’s in there.

He didn’t want to be tapped at anymore, not today, he thought with a hint of panic, which startled him, because what did it matter, he knew how to do this, he could do it in his sleep, and anyway there was nothing special to be found, was there? What secrets could this German-or-Swedish-maybe woman walking toward him be after? What could be left to pry open in him? Surely she knew better than to think she could uncover something new.

He was done with all that.

He’d been baring himself for years now.

He was eighty-two years old, full of creaks and aches and bullet wounds that itched with the turning of the weather. He’d told all his stories and answered all the questions, he had a reputation as a man who loved to talk and it was true, he’d talked and talked throughout these recent years, these presidential years, about the old days, the new days, the yet-to-come-what-will-we-see days, he’d spoken more words than he’d have thought possible in a single lifetime. When he was a little boy, he used to imagine that somewhere in heaven (for this imagining took place in that very early period when he still believed a heaven could exist) a vast crowd of majestic registers counted all the words spoken by every human being in the world, that every time a child was born a new register appeared gleaming among the rows, and all you had to do to see the sum of your life’s speech was reach that heavenplace and find the beautiful machine that bore your name, like one of those old-fashioned cash registers that ring cheerily when you feed them or take anything away, only glowing,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593318412
• ISBN 13: 9780593318416
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien