This book took me by surprise! I am not sure what I was expecting, but this was MORE.
Leda is 17 years old. She is from a tightly monitored family in Italy who experiences a tragedy that is only obliquely referenced at first. She and her betrothed, Dante, decide to emigrate to Argentina, but when she arrives in Buenos Aires in 1913, she is shocked to find that Dante has died, leaving her a widow before she’s ever really had a husband. She tries to make do for a while in a small, welcoming Italian enclave, but a single lady can only last so long before she runs out of money and either needs to A. go home, B. get married, or C. sell herself.
Leda goes with choice D: take her husband’s name, disguise herself as a man, and become a violin player in a tango orquestra.
This is the story of how Leda/Dante navigates, sometimes unsuccessfully, the seedy – and then not-so-seedy – world of tango as it emerges and transforms in late 19-teens Argentina. It’s also about how she wrestles with herself, how she comes to identify as a man despite having a woman’s body, and how she finds and loses love. It’s about a lot of things: deep human connections, immigrant experiences, near-uncontrollable physical passion. There’s a lot about gender here – she is not a man, not a woman, able to love women the way women wish a man would love them, but unable to reveal herself as a woman. Women can’t be musicians, but they can be whores. Dante has to walk the line very, very carefully. Sometimes she forgets to be careful.
But I think mostly, this book is about music. Dante will forego a lot to make her way in the world, but (s)he is absolutely unwilling to forego tango. Making music, and experiencing music, is the throughline. It’s what elevates the sweaty nights in the brothels and the after-dinner conversations in the immigrant communes. It’s what makes life worth living.
If you like your historical fiction with a generous pour of passion and music and passionate music, this may be the book for you.
Important edit! I didn’t choose this based on the author, whom I didn’t recognize at first. I chose it because boy do I love a tango. But as I was writing this review I thought, you know this kind of reminds me of how I felt about Cantoras, which was also a LGBTQ+ book set in South America. Lo and behold, de Robertis is the author of both!
