The challenge of this book is also its triumph: Cristoff makes no effort to lead or coddle the reader, to paint a romantic portrait of a remote land or tell us how we ought react to the lonely, frightening, occasionally heroic lives she exposes. With an almost clinical remove, made possible by the unspoken empathy that comes from growing up "in the middle of that yellowish chalky color that wears out your eyes," Cristoff paints a picture of devastating singularity. Hers is a bold, beautiful book.
The New York Times Book Review - Andrew McCarthy
06/25/2018
"False Calm bears little relation to most travelogues . . . It's not exploration; it's portraiture."—NPR
“An artful, atmospheric, thought-provoking depiction of life between silence and open space.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
"False Calm is fascinating, informative, and ultimately a pleasure to read."—World Literature Today
"Style is perfectly suited to subject; Cristoff travels in a land where real meets surreal and curses, superstition, myth, and mysticism are woven into the fabric of everyday life."—Kirkus Reviews
"Personal memoir, travelogue, and history combine in María Sonia Cristoff’s False Calm , a journey that peels back the layers of the ghostly fog blanketing Patagonia to reveal engrossing complexity."—Foreword Reviews
“Cristoff writes with a razor-sharp voice, and her insight and ability to inhabit the voices of Patagonia—her success as a ‘two-voiced narrator’—make this book a tremendous success.”—Rain Taxi
“Cristoff is far from being just another writer. She is, on the contrary, a magnificent example of a chronicler-essayist narrator: a unique species of those who are possibly on the way to extinction."—Alejandra Costamagna
“Outstanding, fun, insightful.”—Neue Zürcher Zeitung
“A brilliant journalistic investigation."—Denis Scheck, ARD Tagesthemen
“Captivating, intelligent, where the silent strength reaches beyond the real at hand."—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“A marvelous book with literary reportage, possibly one of the best books to come of the hundreds of new translations from Argentinean literature."—Süddeutsche Zeitung
“Impressive literary quality. A profoundly disquieting image of the Argentinean Patagonia and beyond."—Monika Thees, Die Berliner Literaturkritik
2018-07-31
Modern life in the barren foothills of South America, as told by a journalist working from a deeply subconscious perspective.
Possession—both physical and literary—is at the heart of this newly translated 2005 work by Argentinean author Cristoff. Her place is Patagonia, the storied, once-thriving region located in both Argentina and Chile, where the end of the 1990s oil boom left a trickle-down effect of economic misery. Her approach is to become a ghost, to inhabit the lives of the people left behind, to see through their eyes an upended world in which mental illness, suicide, and orphans have become the norm. "The stories came to me," she writes, "the atmosphere used me as a ventriloquist." Style is perfectly suited to subject; she travels in a land where real meets surreal and curses, superstition, myth, and mysticism are woven into the fabric of everyday life. We meet Leon, a formerly prosperous merchant owner who now deals with schizophrenia and his wife's tuberculosis, which may have been caused by environmental contamination. "But anyway, here, where there are more dogs than people, who's going to take the trouble to think about citizens and their rights. They barely even admit that there are people," writes Cristoff. There is also Francisco, a former pilot who now does little more than putter around in his shop. The longest and most impressive story belongs to Martina, whose life of suicide attempts and abuse grows to a quietly powerful conclusion when she meets the father who abandoned her. In Las Heras, the town that "defined Patagonia as a place akin to the netherworld," a rash of teen suicides puts Cristoff in touch with Sandra, a psychic who becomes increasingly lost in her own troubled world.
Unique, imaginative, and unnerving, this is travel literature with a magical realist touch.
