“My first day as a stripper wasn’t much different from the first day of school. On both occasions, I pretended to be braver than I really was.” This is the existential gamble of Romina, the protagonist of this story: to act with a courage that isn’t there until it is obtained.
Carmen. Or How I Got Started in the Business of Dancing Without Clothes (»Carmen. O cómo me inicié en el negocio de bailar sin ropa«) is a novel about daring, in spite of fear. The fear of leaving home, the familiar, the safe, the solid ground. And yet, having the courage to step through the door into the unknown; traveling to the other side of the world to start over, discovering friends where they weren’t expected. The courage to dive into the water, fully clothed, to reach the other shore, to get, somehow, to the other side.
With a fresh voice, agile prose, and a lot of humour, through this autofiction, Romina Pistolas tells us in the first person of an experience rarely seen in literature: how she started in the business of dancing without clothes.