A Political Prisoner Restores His Mind by Talking to a Frog - The New York Times

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THE PRESIDENT AND THE FROG
By Carolina De Robertis

The story of José Mujica, the president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015, is one of extraordinary political reconciliation. Mujica was a leader of the Marxist guerrilla group known as the Tupamaros, who were admired for their ideological earnestness and fancied themselves the avant-garde of change: Their radical communiqués and Robin Hood-like heroics would, they believed, provoke a popular uprising that would lead to the overthrow of the government and a new Uruguay.

In the late 1960s, when the Tupamaros were the epitome of revolutionary cool, their strategy appeared to be working. But by 1970 the government cracked down, assassinating guerrilleros. They responded in kind and a predictable spiral of violence followed. Mujica was shot six times by the police before they were able to arrest him. Three years later the military took power, unleashing a reign of state terror upon the population, and support for the Tupamaros turned into resentment. It wasn’t until the end of the dictatorship that Mujica was released from prison, in 1985. He entered mainstream politics and 25 years later, having charmed the country with his modest way of living and his bracingly spontaneous campaign style, he was elected Uruguay’s 40th president.

The main character of Carolina De Robertis’s fifth novel, “The President and the Frog,” is a thinly veiled version of this unusual man. When De Robertis picks up the story, he is simply “the ex-president”: retired and in his 80s, living in quiet reflection on his wife’s small farm. He is still an international celebrity — because of his lifestyle rather than the relatively tame progressive policies he promulgated in office. His circumstances are so humble they are almost a form of ostentation. As head of state he refused to reside in the presidential palace and preferred his old Volkswagen Beetle to the usual black limousine. Like Mujica’s, his entire worth was the meager value of the Beetle. The novel opens with a young Norwegian journalist arriving to interview him, one of many reporters he has entertained since leaving office; “the Poorest President in the World” makes for good copy.

The mystery of “The President and the Frog” is how its protagonist survived 13 years of torture, interrogation and extreme solitary confinement before his rise to power, a story he has never fully divulged. Something about this sympathetic Norwegian moves him, and, “to his absolute surprise,” he “felt the past rise inside him with a roaring fullness … that closed-up secret, that deep-sea story from 40 years ago.” He won’t tell the interviewer the story, but he will tell us. As the interview progresses, a dual conversation ensues: the live one with the interviewer and a silent one with himself.

The latter comprises the core (and soul) of the novel. The president was confined alone at the bottom of a well, living in the dirt, with no latrine, his scant meals lowered down to him in a bucket. With the revolutionary movement in tatters and a ruthless dictatorship in power, he thought that salvation was impossible: “Hope was the skin that had been flayed.”

The real Mujica has talked frankly about losing the thread of his sanity under similar conditions — of his paranoia and auditory hallucinations in an accelerating torment. De Robertis imagines him in the depths of this psychosis, painstakingly reassembling his mind through a series of conversations with a frog. Though the prisoner doesn’t recognize it as such, the frog is an aspect of himself, tugging him toward memory, as he searches for an area of warmth and kindness that, if he can embrace it tightly enough, will allow him to endure.

De Robertis describes herself as Uruguayan American, and her feeling for the country is profound. But her admiration for her protagonist is so absolute that at times she reduces him to a set of irreproachable — and bloodless — ideals. His homilies about caring only for the well-being of “the people” become repetitive. His admission that he isn’t “perfect” is delivered without any real examination of where the imperfections might reside. When the interviewer asks him an interesting question about the paradox of an anarchist becoming a head of state, the president’s answer is “There’s paradox everywhere,” and disappointingly the subject is dropped.

Still, this is a moving, deeply felt novel, especially 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.

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A Political Prisoner Restores His Mind by Talking to a Frog - The New York Times
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