Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Excerpt from The Invisible Mountain by Caro De Robertis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reading Guide |  Reviews |  Beyond the Book |  Readalikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

The Invisible Mountain by Caro De Robertis

The Invisible Mountain

by Caro De Robertis
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • First Published:
  • Aug 25, 2009, 384 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Aug 2010, 448 pages
  • Rate this book

About this Book

Print Excerpt


One night, at the brothel, Diego shattered a chandelier and two wooden chairs. He was thrown from the building and told not to return. The next night, at his father's insistence, Ignazio brought their gondola to dock at the brothel's steps.

"Come with me."

Ignazio shook his head.

His father stepped onto land, drunk, unsteady. He banged the brass ring against the gilded door. He yelled that he would enter. Three guards came out and punched him and then dragged him down the steps. They pushed him into the gondola, which swayed beneath the pressure.

Diego said, "You can't—"

"Shut up," a guard snarled. Ignazio could not see his face; his massive silhouette turned toward Ignazio. "Can't you control your father? For God's sake. For your family name."

Ignazio felt a hot and creeping slime beneath his skin. He longed to leap into the dark canal and swim very far and never come back. He nodded and pushed the gondola out onto the water.

Six months later, on a cold winter night, Diego cracked his wife's skull against the wall and loped outside. The canal growled under the wind. From the window of his room, Ignazio saw his father's shadow teeter on the edge of the canal, then fall as if thrown from an invisible fist.

Ignazio lay silent until he heard his sister-in-law's cry from the kitchen—dead, dead, Mamma is dead. He closed his eyes. His mother flooded across his mind: embracing him at six years old when he'd scraped his knee, her thick breasts covering his ears so that they filled with sounds like the inside of a shell; humming, tenor-low, while kneading dough for gnocchi in the kitchen; watching him as he put his coat on with his brothers, flesh swollen around her eyes. His chest burned. If his father had not thrown himself into the water, Ignazio could have killed him with bare hands. He heard Nonno sit up in the bed across from his.

"Eh? What happened?"

Ignazio spent the next five hours cleaning blood from the walls and the body.

Two days later, Diego's body washed up at the front steps of a count whose gondola order had never been completed. He surfaced just in time to make the journey to San Michele with his wife.

The corpses crossed the water, thronged by the living. The sky was pale with shock. A fleet of mourners—sons, daughters, wives and husbands, children, great-aunts, uncles, drenched in black—rode their gondolas in an entourage behind the coffins. San Michele loomed before them, with its township of tombs, soaking in the prayers and wails that ebbed over the water.

Ignazio rowed numbly. The world was not the world but a mere painting of itself; apart; impenetrable; all the grieving people only brushstrokes; he in the midst of it, pretending to be real, wearing a life of someone else's making. Only Nonno Umberto still seemed viscerally true. His breath labored as they disembarked, audible through the drone of Hail Marys. He leaned on Ignazio's arm. He smelled of soap and vinegar and a bitter trace of sweat.

Sepulchral rows, priestly mutterings, aunts weeping, slate moved aside to lower caskets into ground. Ignazio watched the remains of his parents (man and wife, he thought, killer and killed) sink slowly, together, into the dark. The stone slab groaned as his brothers pushed it back into place, shutting in the dead.

"Ignazio," his grandfather said. "Take me for a walk."

They escaped the praying crowd and walked the cobbled path. The tombs of the rich loomed around them, edifices twice the size of the Firielli kitchen, wrought with statues. Sylphs and ancient gods and grieving angels gazed their way. They moved past them to a row of simple tombs, unadorned boxes submerged in the ground. Nonno stopped at one of them. Ignazio read the names etched into marble: porzia firielli. donato firielli. armino firielli. rosa firielli. eracla firielli. isabella firielli. He chanted them, one after the other, in his mind, Porzia, Donato, Armino, Rosa, Eracla, Isabella, his aunts, his uncles, frozen children, unknown ghosts.

Excerpted from The Invisible Mountains by Carolina De Robertis Copyright © 2009 by Carolina De Robertis. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book:
  Uruguay

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Our Evenings
    Our Evenings
    by Alan Hollinghurst
    Alan Hollinghurst's novel Our Evenings is the fictional autobiography of Dave Win, a British ...
  • Book Jacket: Graveyard Shift
    Graveyard Shift
    by M. L. Rio
    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
  • Book Jacket: The Sisters K
    The Sisters K
    by Maureen Sun
    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...
  • Book Jacket: Linguaphile
    Linguaphile
    by Julie Sedivy
    From an infant's first attempts to connect with the world around them to the final words shared with...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

F the M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.