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 María 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.
‘False Calm bears little relation to most travelogues … It’s not exploration; it’s portraiture.’ NPR
‘This book will help you discover the other side of Patagonia. It is written with precision and passion about the place and its people — a must-read.’ Morning Star
‘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
For readers of Sidetracked, Granta, Lodestars and The Passenger.
