False Calm: A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia

(Paperback)

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Description

With time I have reached the conclusion that, as it is in my personal history, isolation is present in everything I have ever read about Patagonia . . . I returned to write an account of this eminently Patagonian characteristic. I wanted to see the shapes it takes today; I wanted to locate it at its furthest extremes.

Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm finds Argentinian author Mara Sonia Cristoff writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia as she journeys from one small town to the next.

Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. She explores Patagonia's complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit. In one town, a man struggles to maintain one of just two remaining stores because buses refuse to stop as scheduled; in another, the television in each household plays the same channel; elsewhere, she speaks with an amateur pilot who assembles model aeroplanes to keep himself company. Everywhere, Cristoff blends superstition, myth and firsthand accounts to conjure the reality of a Patagonia that unveils a startlingly lucid netherworld.

'A bold, beautiful book.' New York Times
'An artful, atmospheric, thought-provoking depiction of life between silence and open space.' Los Angeles Review of Books
'Unique, imaginative and unnerving.' Kirkus

Reviews

'It has a magical quality, an intimate journey, so humane, one that opens the imagination and reminds us of who we have been and what we have, and have lost.' Philippe Sands

Author Bio

Mara Sonia Cristoff is the author of Derroche (2022, Sara Gallardo Award), Mal de poca (2017, Mdicis Prize Finalist), Bajo influencia (2010), Desubicados (2006). Her books Falsa Calma (False Calm) and Inclyanme afuera (Include Me Outside) have been published in English, translated by Katherine Silver. She has edited volumes on literary nonfiction (Idea crnica and Pasaje a Oriente) and participated in a series of collective works. She has been writer-in-residence in Iowa and Leipzig and her books have been published in several Latin American countries and translated into English, French, German, Italian and Swedish. She lives in Buenos Aires.

Katherine Silver has translated works by Horacio Castellanos Moya, Csar Aira, Julio Cortzar, Juan Carlos Onetti, Julio Ramn Ribeyro, and many others. She is the former director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC), and the author of Echo Under Story. She does volunteer interpreting for asylum seekers.