False Calm
A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
"A bold, beautiful book."—The New York Times
"A marvelous chronicle."—Publishers Weekly
Part reportage, part personal essay, part travelogue, False Calm is the breakout work by Argentinian author María Sonia Cristoff. Writing against romantic portrayals of Patagonia, Cristoff returns home to chronicle the ghost towns left behind by the oil boom. In prose that showcases her sharp powers of observation, Cristoff explores Patagonia’s complicated legacy through the lost stories of its people and the desolate places they inhabit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Isolation is present in everything I have found written about Patagonia," Argentinian author Cristoff writes at the beginning of this marvelous chronicle of her sojourn in the remote, vast region, where one "could walk and walk but still remain in the same place." The "ghost towns" she visits El Cain, Ca ad n Seco, Las Heras, among others lie at almost the literal end of the Earth. But the true isolation here is psychological: the book's strength lies not in descriptions of the places Cristoff visits but in its portraits of the people she meets. There is Martina, an unpublished novelist abandoned as a young child and married to an abusive singer at 16, who leaves her husband after discovering his affair with her own mother and takes up gambling because she enjoys "seeing, for the first time, that men were like defenseless creatures around those smoke-filled tables." Most memorable is gardener and self-declared telepath Sandra, who is convinced that a teen suicide epidemic in Las Heras is the work of a secret cabal conducting mind-control experiments. These sharply observed essays prove that while the landscape of Patagonia may be desolate, it also teems with human fears, aspirations, and love.
