The Plains
Published on 15. October 2024
214 pages
978-1-913867-93-5 (ISBN)
Description
After a loss, a year in the country: four seasons to transform a garden and a self.
'In the city the notion of the hours of the day, of the passage of time, is lost. In the countryside that is impossible,' our narrator tells us. In this remote house and garden, time is almost palpable; it goes by without haste and brings into sharp relief even the tiniest details: insects, the sound of the rain, a falling leaf, the smell of damp earth. Past and present are equally weighted and visible here, revealing themselves slowly with every season and turn of the spade.So a year unfolds. A garden takes shape as his connection deepens to this place, becoming a shelter from everyone and everything, perhaps even from himself. We see the ants devouring the chard, we hear the tales his grandmother told, perhaps real, perhaps taken from a movie, and we learn about his great love, Ciro. The humid sheets in the country, the carefully renovated apartment in the city and the painful, inexplicable break-up that prompted him to take refuge in this patch of now-carefully tended land.
'In the city the notion of the hours of the day, of the passage of time, is lost. In the countryside that is impossible,' our narrator tells us. In this remote house and garden, time is almost palpable; it goes by without haste and brings into sharp relief even the tiniest details: insects, the sound of the rain, a falling leaf, the smell of damp earth. Past and present are equally weighted and visible here, revealing themselves slowly with every season and turn of the spade.So a year unfolds. A garden takes shape as his connection deepens to this place, becoming a shelter from everyone and everything, perhaps even from himself. We see the ants devouring the chard, we hear the tales his grandmother told, perhaps real, perhaps taken from a movie, and we learn about his great love, Ciro. The humid sheets in the country, the carefully renovated apartment in the city and the painful, inexplicable break-up that prompted him to take refuge in this patch of now-carefully tended land.
Reviews / Votes
"This meditative, astute novel is an aesthetic experience from an author striving to merge the paintbrush and the pen." -The Times Literary Supplement"In his attention to the slow rhythm of our days, Falco makes the case for writing that simply observes the plain work of living, and in so doing, reveals its gentle poetry." -The Telegraph
"A profoundly poetic reflection on the human experience [...] The Plains is a captivating and thought-provoking exploration of love, loss, and personal growth." -Morning Star
"The Plains is awash with a kind of fragmented, undulating delicacy." -Asymptote
"The melancholic aspects of this beautifully rendered novel and its refusal to follow formal patterns of narration, its prose imbued with hurt and healing, are reminiscent of Jeremy Cooper's ostensible nature diary Ash Before Oak." -Irish Times
"An absolutely magnificent book, and unlike any other. It got to my very neurones!" -Deborah Eisenberg , author of YOUR DUCK IS MY DUCK
"Under the false appearance of a book without sound or fury, The Plains hides massacres, guerrillas and duels." -El Pais
"The Plains is a unique novel. The story has a stark simplicity that makes it all the more overwhelming and pointed." -Infobae
"Falco is a measured writer. That's it: he writes just the right amount needed, shows some and hides the rest. Nothing is lacking and nothing goes spare in The Plains, a story that is told in small doses." -Revista Indie Hoy
"A beautiful book about mourning a separation in which we can also glimpse the difficult journey to become oneself, the complex arithmetic of love, and the value of literature as catharsis. A slow, elusive, delicate and subtle book." -El Cultural
""Falco's imagery and sentiments are frequently lyrical, and Croft's translation revels in those subtleties."" -Southwest Review
"The countryside - the plains - sometimes feels like freedom and sometimes represents the inhospitable. Language recreates the landscape, and though 'mysteriously it seems doomed to failure it ends up actually enhancing the landscape'. Recounting the other, recreating it with words, is also a way of remaining." -Clarin
"From the earliest Romantics to Juan Jose Saer or Cesar Aira, Argentinian literature has spent centuries trying to populate and make sense of emptiness of the Pampas. Never before, we might say, has it conceived such a lovingly populated solitude." -Revista Otra Parte
"This is a singular text - a thorny issue to call it a novel - where there is hardly any plot, more like a sketch of fictional notes written from the subsoil, a sort of slow epic told from the field, a pure liquid flow of the ephemeral, of the fugitive and fleeting that is recounted here autobiographically as if it sought to be the story of a character who is in search of lost time and found in the 'horizontality' of the pampa which 'is also the absence of height'." -El Tiempo
"To a large extent The Plains is a tribute to the traditional Argentine landscape, to its pampas, where the city cowboys, the city gauchos, go to fight against their sadness. A moving and terribly beautiful book." -Culturamas
"The novel is one of the most successful among writers from Cordoba about this flat countryside." -Letralia
"The Plains can be smelled, touched, heard, tasted, and contemplated. The universe the narrator creates to cope with his grief is built with an astonishing physicality, uncontainable, and he allows us to enter it with a deceptive simplicity." -Revista penultiMa
"A novel of great versatility and beauty." -Cuadernos del Sur
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Praise for Federico Falco
Winner of an English PEN Translates Award 2023
Winner of the Medife/Filba Prize 2021
Finalist of the Herralde Prize for Novels 2022
"The quiet assurance with which Falco addresses rural environments represents a departure recalling the perspectives of writers from the northern hemisphere such as Denis Johnson, Knut Hamsun or Tobias Wolff." -The Times Literary Supplement
"Expansive and ingeniously crafted-an unforgettable collection." -Kirkus, starred review
"Falco proves himself as a fine storyteller." -Publishers Weekly
"These rich and authentic portraits of Argentinian lives are well worth seeking out...You could imagine Alastair McLeod or John McGahern paying homage. (5 stars)" -RTE
"Moving, morbid, and humorous at the same time." -LA Review of Books
"Falco is a master of the short story."" -Martin MacInnes , author of INFINITE GROUND and GATHERING EVIDENCE
"His stories shimmer like revelations - the clarity, mystery, beauty, depth, and sheer, thrilling peculiarity of ordinary life when the veil lifts. They're exhilarating to read, just as exhilarating to re-read."" -Deborah Eisenberg , author of YOUR DUCK IS MY DUCK
"Each powerful story captivates and I cannot recommend this collection enough." -Morning Star
"When people praise Chekhov, stories like this are what they're thinking of." -James Crossley, Madison Books
"Croft's translations of the stories in A Perfect Cemetery are loyal to the profound beauty, rootedness, and longing they portray." -World Literature Today
"At long last, Argentine author Federico Falco finally has a full-length work in translation. A Perfect Cemetery is a 2016 collection of five stories, several of which are much longer than traditional short stories (thankfully so). With confident prose, storytelling verve, and remarkable consideration for both character and landscape, Falco writes impressively well. Though plights of fancy embroil each of Falco's characters, they are conveyed with a compassion and authenticity that make them seem utterly lifelike." -Jeremy Garber, Powell's Bookshop
"Every word and sentence, including those of Croft's sincere and illuminating note that concludes the volume, should be savored, consumed in a rush only during those moments when you're flying down the summer streets with Silvi on her bicycle as she searches for the boy she believes she loves." -On the Seawall
"As so often in this compelling collection, the stories only open out once you finish them." -David's Book World
"The succinctness of the plotlines in these stories is inversely proportional to their vast narrative expanse, to everything the writing is able to carve out between the sharply curtailed dialogues and all that simmers underneath." -La Nacion
"Perfectly honed... [Falco's] skill is apparent in the originality of these plots, the economy and naturalness of the characters' conversations, and in the meticulous observation of a gesture that may encapsulate whole central motifs" -N Magazine
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Not illustrated
ISBN-13
978-1-913867-93-5 (9781913867935)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Persons
Federico Falco (General Cabrera, Cordoba, Argentina, 1977) is an Argentinian writer and poet. He holds a BA in Communications from Blas Pascal University in Argentina and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University. In 2004, he was given the Young Writers Award by the Spanish Cultural Centre of Cordoba, Argentina. In 2005, he received a grant for improvement from the National Trust for the Arts of Argentina, and in 2009, a scholarship from New York University and the Banco Santander Foundation. Granta selected him as one of The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists in 2010. The Plains is his most recent novel. In 2021 it won the Medife Prize in Argentina and was the runner up for the Herralde Prize in Spain.
Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey , the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Northwestern University and is a Presidential Professor at the University of Tulsa.
Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey , the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Northwestern University and is a Presidential Professor at the University of Tulsa.
