The Plains

By Federico Falco and Jennifer Croft

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charco Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781913867935

Federico Falco

Federico Falco (General Cabrera, Córdoba, 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 Córdoba, 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 Medifé Prize in Argentina and was the runner up for the Herralde Prize in Spain.

Book preview

Cover of The Plains by Federico Falco

The Plains

First published by Charco Press 2024

Charco Press Ltd., Office 59, 44-46 Morningside Road, Edinburgh

EH10 4BF

Copyright © Federico Falco, 2020

First published in Spanish as Los llanos by Anagrama

English translation copyright © Jennifer Croft 2024

The rights of Federico Falco to be identified as the author of this work and of Jennifer Croft to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by the applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781913867928

e-book: 9781913867935

www.charcopress.com

Edited by Fionn Petch

Cover designed by Pablo Font

Typeset by Laura Jones-Rivera

Proofread by Fiona Mackintosh

Federico Falco

The Plains

Translated by

Jennifer Croft

For Santi and Sole

For Cande and Julita

For Gonza

For Manolo

It was as if

[…]

the landscape had a syntax

similar to that of our language

and as I moved along

a long sentence was being spoken

on the right and another on the left

and I thought

Maybe the landscape

can understand what I say too.

Ron Padgett

JANUARY

In the city, it’s easy to lose track of the time of day, of the passage of time.

In the country, it is impossible.

The noises of dusk, the birds as they settle onto their branches, the parrots’ squawks, the chimangos’ shrieks, the pigeons’ flapping wings. Then, out of nowhere, calm. Silence. The sound of a urinating cow, a stream that batters the ground. Another cow moos in the distance. The call of a bull, more distant still. A few dogs barking. The sky on a night with no moon, no stars. It’s time to head inside. The white light of the buzzing bulb. I make myself dinner. I take a shower. The water erases the day’s sweat, scent of cheap soap, of cleanness. No matter what I do, specks of black earth stay lodged under my fingernails. I sit reading next to the lamp, to the drone of the insects on the other side of the mosquito net.

Toads on the veranda, a stray bird stirring on its branch, a lapwing squawks.

Outside is dark and formless. The light is soft and warm in the kitchen. In this stillness, a sense of protection, of refuge. The hum of the refrigerator motor.

It cools down. The silence before dawn is at once both dense and crystalline. Nothing stirs, there is no wind. It is a total silence. No cars, no tussling dogs. The only audible thing, sometimes, is a cow’s hooves striking the ground as it shifts its weight from one leg to the other.

It’s like a block of silence. If anything stirs, it does so stealthily, with so much caution it’s impossible to detect, creeping, slithering, delving, careful, controlling every movement.

The sun comes up. The first are the birds, just as soon as the dark starts to dissipate on the horizon. The usual calls, a cacophony that intensifies as the light gets stronger, oranger. Then when the sun is high enough, when its rays filter even and translucent through the branches of the trees, the bees arrive. They buzz around, heavy, in the flowers and the grass. The flies, the blowflies. As the heat rises, the cows lash their haunches to drive away the insects, or they shake their hides.

The battle against insects, against the wild, against all that comes from elsewhere, from outside: things you don’t have to worry about, in general, in the city. After a while there’s nothing you can do except surrender: live with the flies, with the horseflies, the stink bugs, the frogs sitting right by the door that time and time again, whenever they get the chance, slip inside the kitchen.

On Friday afternoons, my grandparents would come and collect me at the entrance to my school. I’d take a bag. Three pairs of underwear, three pairs of socks, my old sneakers, a nightshirt, two or three books, a spare pair of sweatpants, clothing for being outdoors, an outfit to wear into town.

When I was a child, when I was seven, eight, nine, ten years old, the weekend began on Friday afternoons, on the last streets of the town, at the source of Güero Road, an old road, so old it had been eaten away by the wind over the years so that now it was more like a passageway deep between two earthen walls, like the bed of an ancient trench, sunken into the earth by the force of so many comings and goings, backs and forths, journeys: the wear and tear of bodies.

It was an F100 with a gear stick on the steering wheel, and I rode up front, in the middle. It sank into the dense guadal as it advanced along that roofless tunnel, flanked by those two dirt walls. From above, from the surface, long, dried-out weeds would cascade over the walls.

We drove on at that depth, a shopping bag always situated between my grandma’s legs: bread, meat, sugar, pasta. The air vents only open a crack, the windows rolled all the way up to keep the dust out.

Below us, that earth that was very loose and very fine, shifting, almost like a faded grey or brown talcum powder, lighter-looking than sand, almost the colour of chalk or dry bone. And the corn husks that swirled in the ditches, in times of high winds, after the threshing.

Farther along, the ground grew harder, coarser, and the road rose until it ran parallel to a series of wire fences. Then came, sudden and spectacular, the plain: flat, even, clods of earth in a fallow field, cornstalks cut a foot from the soil, a herd of cows with lowered heads snuffling for stray grains between straw and earth.

By then the light would have softened and then turned a fiery orange. The radio would be on, low. At that hour, almost always, a tango programme on LV16, Río Cuarto Radio. On the Rovettos’, rising above the line of the horizon, three gigantic Phoenix palms, in the ploughed soil where once there stood a brick house that little by little kept disappearing with every trip, as though the wind were slowly eroding it, in silence.

By the time we got to Hanged Man Road, the uppermost sky would be fading into a cold, hard blue, and my grandfather would turn on the truck’s headlights. The last rays of the sun would redden the chañar by the side of the road where an Italian man, driven mad by the war, had hung himself many years earlier, having got lost one night, believing that the newly inaugurated lights of the town – far away, barely a whitish glow reflecting off the clouds – were the flashes of cannons on some brand new battlefield.

Which war would that have been? Which war had the man conflated with the lights of the town? The one that began in 1914? The one in Libya? The one in Ethiopia?

No one remembers what that Italian man’s name was, nor what war he had conflated with the glint of a white route, of lights that only ever wanted to be progress.

Or could it have been New Year’s Eve in the small town, and end-of-year fireworks dyeing the darkness of the sky?

Various versions of the anecdote remain in circulation.

The beauty of the three Phoenix palms standing alone in the middle of a field, struck by the orange sun at sunset, as though on a poster of ancient Egypt. Fireworks, each one of their crowns. An ecstatic explosion. On each leaf, green tips of a spark expanding, lemon-yellow core when the palm is newly blooming. Gentle orange once the dates hang ripe in their clusters.

The memory of the truck’s lights as they revealed the road. The light proceeds metre by metre, devouring the darkness, discovering new tracks in the black.

The texture of an old souvenir photo. Washed-out colours, amber, tungsten, Bakelite, earthenware blue, the flicker, the underwater silence of the image as if it were in Super 8, the murmur of the running projector.

A hare perfectly still in the middle of the road. The base of its eyes reflecting the headlights, glowing red. Then the hare jumps, races in zigzags, clambers up to where the fence is, slips into the field.

I prune the oregano, prune the thyme, compose the sprigs into bouquets, tie them with twine, hang them upside down from a couple of nails in the wall. It is insanely hot, from morning to night, all day long.

Near the aloe vera, under the araucaria, I find the nest of a little black and yellow snake. It’s a small hollow, nothing more. It sleeps in there, coiled. Sometimes it sticks its head out into the sun. Whenever I get close, it darts away.

I spade and rake the soil. I prepare a piece of land and transplant some peppers. The heat doesn’t let me continue. The sun beats down so hard you can’t be anywhere. I lie down on my back on the cold tiles in an effort to take a siesta. Then I go to Lobos and buy a twenty-five-metre hose, a fly curtain, Raid, Manchester Fluid, more seeds. At dusk, I read under the oak, on a thin sheet of canvas.

A man passes by on the road, on a bicycle, in shorts, pedalling slowly, against the stormy sky. Then thunder, but in the distance, almost inaudible. And clouds that only seem to move if you stand still and stare at them for ages. They look like masses of dense, heavy paint, swirls of oil that collide and intermingle. It doesn’t rain, and it doesn’t cool off. It hasn’t rained in a month. The countryside is all yellow, all dry.

Sun at its highest point. That midday silence, when everything – wind, birds, insects – quiets to collect itself, waiting for the heat to subside. Powerlessness because it will not rain. All I can hear is my own footsteps on the sunburned lawn, on the gravel of the path and the loose earth.

Inside, the creaking of the sheet metal and wood of the roof. The countryside charged with electricity in the withered heat of the afternoon.

January heat that scorches everything. The ants eat up the chard. The birds eat up the rest. It doesn’t rain, and whatever has sprouted curls in on itself and dries up. Only the sweet corn holds out slightly. I water as much as I can, but I’m overcome by malaise and by fire. Every morning, something akin to despair. Over and over I tell myself that there’s a season for everything. A season for sowing. A season for reaping. A rainy season. A dry season. A season for learning to wait, to allow for the passage of time.

Sometimes, when I would get bored or the journey would start to feel endless, my grandmother would tell me stories as we went. The story of an uncle on the Giraudo side, long dead, who would use the corner of the tablecloth as a napkin and, to avoid getting anything on his clothes, even tuck it into the collar of his shirt. Once he was having lunch at the Viña de Italia Hotel, where he always stayed when he travelled to the city of Córdoba, and he saw another uncle on the Giraudo side who was passing by the window. He leaped up to catch him, pleased by the coincidence, and as he stood, he dragged the tablecloth with him, strewing the cups, his soup, the plates, the silverware all over the floor.

The story of another uncle on the Giraudo side as he was learning how to drive one of the very first cars to reach that area, how one day it got dark when he was on the road. The brother who was with him was barely more experienced than he was, but he offered him tips and instructions as they occurred to him. Suddenly they saw two lights approaching, and the brother told him to pull over because another car was coming toward them. Uncle Giraudo yielded, pulling all the way over onto the shoulder, but it turned out that what was coming wasn’t another car, but rather two motorcycles, one next to the other, each with its own bulb to light the way.

The pair continued driving, and a little later, they saw a single light approach.

It’s a car with one headlight burned out, said the brother who was acting as co-pilot, and Uncle Giraudo got off the road, waited on the shoulder, and when the light had passed them, they saw that it was not a car missing a headlight, but rather a single motorcycle, with its single headlight on.

Uncle Giraudo said nothing, got into first gear, and returned to the road. They couldn’t have been driving for more than ten minutes before they saw two lights ahead of them again.

Two more motorcycles! I’ll slip in between, said Uncle Giraudo, determined not to budge so much as a centimetre this time, and that was how they got into a head-on collision with another automobile exactly like their own.

Many years later I saw the same joke in a Buster Keaton movie. Could it have been a coincidence, or did some roving projector make its way to Punta del Agua or Perdices to show black and white movies on a sheet hung in the churchyard? Could my grandmother have seen that film when she was a child, and taken the anecdote from there?

Or perhaps a Giraudo uncle, one of the only ones who had the money to travel sometimes to Córdoba, or to Rosario, might have seen it there in a cinema and decided to make the anecdote his own, telling it to his nieces upon his return?

Lights in the night, automobiles, bikes. Silent movies like dreams and a laughter that explodes on impact, at the crash, the undoing, the thing that splits in two.

And then we would come to the Santa María ranch, where we’d turn left, onto the main road, the Perdices road, which was also an old road, and a deep one, slumped to the side where a broad canal brought water through with every storm from El Espinillal, from El Molle, from Puente La Selva. The Bocha Pignatelli farm, the Gastaudo farm. And all at once, as if out of nowhere, a line of light posts, a narrow road that opened up to the right. Down the first drive lived Juan Pancho and Juan Jorge, cousins of my mother’s, my grandfather’s nephews. We drove down the second drive.

Arriving by night, the truck’s lights sweeping over the sheds, the wisteria. The truck’s lights against the garage wall, getting smaller and smaller, more and more concentrated, as we approached. The silence and the black of the countryside once the engine was off. The fluorescent bulb in the kitchen, Uncle Tonito – a bachelor uncle, my grandfather’s brother – who’d already eaten dinner and gone to bed, but who had left the light on for us.

Sleeping in the twin-sized bed that had belonged to my mother before she got married, before she moved to the small town. The bed against the wall, under a window. The freezing sheets that felt slightly damp. Shivering until my body was able to warm all the places it touched. Keeping still, avoiding the areas that remained ice-cold. Just barely feeling them with the tips of my bare toes. Immediate retreat.

Sleeping in socks. Sleeping in sweatpants and a t-shirt. Going to pee in the middle of the night, feeling the cold of the tiles that pierced the fabric of my socks.

Things in the dark no longer exist. At night, everything everywhere seems to disappear. All that remains is the house, its interior, its white walls. A house afloat in black.

If I turn on some of the lights outside – the one by the front door, or the one on the veranda, or the one by the kitchen door – what they reach will become part of my world. I’ll look out the window and, in the amber light of those bulbs, make out three to four metres of scorched grass, but then the light peters out, and darkness shifts into matter, takes on heft.

On the other hand, if I don’t turn on any lights, when I look out the window, my eyes, adjusted to the darkness, instantly perceive shapes and contours. The eucalyptus and oak trees are black bulks backed by a sky of deep but luminous blue, with just a smattering of stars. If there aren’t

Reviews for The Plains

[Tavo1991 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quick to read. With a diary style, melancholic, reflecting the grief of heartbreak, how we isolate ourselves and seek an escape in an environment outside our comfort zone. With interesting quotes and everyday situations. (Translated from Spanish)

[Robe Lee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the most beautiful books I’ve read. A beautiful novel about a mourning that unfolds in the countryside. With its words, it made me feel its pain, to smell the scents of the countryside; to hear the rain and the rural wind shaking everything. It’s a story that embraces you despite dealing with a pain as deep as grief. I liked it a lot. (Translated from Spanish)

[brendacrono · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Transition of a Grief. A book filled with pain, conveyed in a beautifully poetic manner.
Through the orchard, you become immersed in the feelings of the protagonist, influenced by nature and time. In small doses, Federico tells us the story of the character, his relationship with Ciro, their separation, and his decision to navigate this change of life in the countryside.
Metaphors on every page that must inevitably be underlined.
A book that needs to be read and reread. (Translated from Spanish)

[EzequielW · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Engaging novel, although at times monotonous and repetitive, with little action. Some reflections from the protagonist on life, love, and the passage of time are noteworthy. An excess of exhaustive descriptions about the countryside and the garden makes the novel heavy and dull. Good but not extraordinary. (Translated from Spanish)

[Jvergel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a beautiful novel!!! Books often fall into our hands at just the right moment. I must say that this one wasn't specifically about a theme or something, but it touches our delicate emotional strings regarding grief, breakups, or loss—of something and also of oneself within it. When I say that this was the moment, mine, I refer to my experience as a reader. I've been reading for a long time, which doesn't mean I've always read well. Years ago, I wouldn’t have known how to appreciate this book; it would have seemed repetitive to me, merely descriptive with some noble phrases. Today, with different reading eyes, I say that this, the form—which is a choice of the author—gives more power to what seems to be concealed in the countless exquisite descriptions of the countryside, the plain. Details that enhance the essence of what it is about: A novel with a first-person narrator, which we can say, if it’s not autobiographical, might be autofiction. Because from the start, we don’t know the protagonist's name, but halfway through the book, he makes a reference to childhood memories where he wrote his name FEDE with sticks (just like the writer). The protagonist, a writer of short stories, who conducts workshops, a city dweller who cannot write, goes to live and cultivate a garden in the countryside. Intuitively, we suspect as readers that he is fleeing from something, but much later it will be confirmed that he is grieving a romantic breakup. He sows, cultivates, tries, and starts over; he can't write stories... so he writes in a diary format, with short, simple sentences that he organizes by months—January, February, etc.—which is what we are reading (the novel). With prose that has poetic tones, he immerses us in the diary of doing and not doing in the plains. About what life is like in that place, his childhood memories, his family history, the garden, sowing, caring, trying, and having to wait. The waiting marks TIME as a protagonist. A chronological time through those months and an atmospheric time because he plays with and shows us contrasts of the fast and the slow, of heat and cold, of winter and summer in the pampas, of nature. Those descriptions (the tremendous eye and skill of the writer) that might seem boring to others have their meaning; they speak of the changes in nature analogous to the changes he is experiencing in that time and place. Moreover, it becomes a tribute to this Argentine territory. There’s a paragraph that seems crucial to me: “Time passes easily in movies, in novels. Only important actions are told, those that advance the plot. The rest—the doubts, the boredom, the stagnant sadness, the long days where nothing changes—disappears with a stroke of ellipsis. What do sad people in movies do with all the hours of the day? It’s as if in the time of grief there were no narrative...” The plains is the answer; it speaks of that time of what we don’t see in the movies but happens, of the forced waiting, of displeasure, of varying humor, a novel as his way of narrating and narrating himself in that time of grief, rewriting himself and his story. And he does it in a sublime way! A tremendously beautiful and moving novel. (Translated from Spanish)

[urraca99 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A lot of singing about the countryside and outdated lyricism. The fact that the protagonist is homosexual is not revealed until halfway through the novel, and this information does not matter for the interest of a nonexistent plot. (Translated from Spanish)

[daniela27 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The plains, a book that provoked in me the pure pleasure of reading. An intense book, very intimate, a delight. In this reflective exercise, Federico Falco makes us vibrate with a harmonious prose of extreme beauty, full of musicality, while moving us with the vastness of words and a narrative of exquisite sensitivity. A novel about the passage of mourning; dealing with the anguish of not knowing what happened, with the uncertainty of what is to come, battling day by day with patience and anxiety, with sorrow and desperation. Evocative texts and a close look at simple and not-so-simple things... a small farmhouse in the middle of the countryside, the ups and downs of a garden, the end of a romantic relationship, family ties, interrupted writing. About this last point, the analogy that Falco makes between the garden and writing is extremely accurate: advance, setback, pause, can one control a garden? Can one control writing? The toil of writing is present all the time. I celebrate this book by Federico Falco; its reading moved me from start to finish. "Being with another is difficult. Being with another is work, an effort. Understanding, or not understanding, or trying to understand. What one thinks one is. What the other believes one is. One's own desires and wishes. The other’s desires. The other’s wishes. The other’s work and one's own work. Teamwork: work, partnership, friendship, neighborliness. Wear and tear, misunderstandings, half-words. What is not seen, what is not heard, what is not wanted to be seen, what is so terribly painful that one prefers not to know." (February) (Translated from Spanish)

[Un chino en la luna · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What would you do to forget a love? How would you navigate the grief? The protagonist of the novel chooses a somewhat unusual and, I believe, more painful way than the usual one. He isolates himself in a garden; thus begins this very intelligent novel, a year told month by month, where we experience the transition of his grief and the unfolding of nature in parallel. All of this seasoned with the secret wisdom of the verses of some poets. (Translated from Spanish)

[Fersiq 77 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The plains, a story of loss, of mourning, separation as an emotional break, and the search to continue everything in the plains, in the countryside, in a garden. Too much information related to customs and the work of the garden and little of the past, the best that could be contributed, the life story, the author's grandparents and parents. (Translated from Spanish)

[Cecilia77 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very beautiful book. I was deeply moved by the passage of time, that retreat into oneself in the midst of the countryside, starting over after losing the most important thing, mourning, trying to understand one’s own history. (Translated from Spanish)

[aridipi · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A story that begins with the end of a love, and the decision to seek an escape that helps to pass the time and forget. It will be in the countryside, and with a garden, that the author will traverse his past, that of his ancestors, and the love he wishes to leave behind in a landscape that is at times enveloping and almost always desolate. Falco, in the first person, has the power to transport the reader to that inhospitable village, exploring every detail of nature in his quest to reconnect with himself and heal the wounds of heartbreak. His parents, his grandfather, his 91-year-old grandmother, and Ciro will be the beloved characters that leave marks on what is. (Translated from Spanish)

[Pico1974 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A catharsis in a rural environment. (Translated from Spanish)

[G. Munckel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Each page of this novel overflows with beauty. It is a slow book that grows with descriptions: the garden, the animals, the countryside, the passage of the seasons, the endless horizon. Falco has a moving sensitivity to details. He observes everything calmly: each plant and its demands, its little battles against insects and birds; the line of the horizon and the different trees that interrupt it; the sky with all its colors, the clouds and their promises. It is a simple story: after separating from her boyfriend, a writer goes to live in a house in the countryside, in Zapiola. Partly to take refuge in what she knows, in the memory of another countryside, where she spent weekends during her childhood, in Córdoba. Partly to try to tame her anxiety and sadness, her inner noise, by working the land, growing her own food, observing the landscape as a mirror. A bit like the story “Guiding the Ivy” by Hebe Uhart, but on a larger scale. A novel to learn to look at oneself as one looks at the countryside, to have the same patience for oneself as one has for a garden, adjusting to its rhythm and understanding that “there is a time for everything. A time for sowing. A time for harvesting. A time for drizzle. A time for drought. A time to learn to wait for the passage of time.” (Translated from Spanish)

[Anabella Alb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A book that brings peace when reading it. Far from the frenzy of other genres. (Translated from Spanish)

[en.el.carrousel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Simple, melancholic, and beautiful. It ended up ruining my life. (Translated from Spanish)

[Laliteraria · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When this book came to me and I read the word "rural" in its synopsis, I imagined a flat (forgive the redundancy), slow, monotonous read.

I delved in anyway, giving it a chance because perhaps the nature this novel invites would do me good during these complex days.

The slowness of the days and the descriptions of things that were distant to me were initially frustrating. I understood the madness in which we are immersed with this reading, which on one hand made me uncomfortable, and on the other hand brought me peace.

This novel is not just about the countryside; it is about childhood, love, solitude, and emptiness. It is filled with aromas, landscapes, silences, and reflections. The everyday mingled with the memories that inhabit us; an invitation to other readings present in subtle hints.

I am left with the passage through emptiness, with the strategies the character deploys to navigate it and not get lost in it:

"To tie oneself to something. To a garden, a forest, a plant, a word."

"To create a garden to fill a void."

Maybe this space is a way to fill my emptiness. Literature certainly is.

What’s yours?

@lali.teraria (Translated from Spanish)

[Umma1945 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A beautiful, simple, and short novel, where the character's loneliness in the distance from a love and the reinvention of a home connect you with the nature of planting through a garden, cultivating the soul. (Translated from Spanish)

[MaxiQuino · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this autofiction, the protagonist escapes from heartbreak. He chooses to move to the countryside. While living there, he will spend his mourning cultivating his vegetable garden. That is his way of filling his emptiness, working hard in a garden.

The book unfolds between descriptions of country life, family memories, anecdotes of ancestral relatives (such as his great-grandfather who also escapes to the countryside, although he is exiled from a war-torn Italy and not from heartbreak), his breakup, and especially in "the wide empty time," "the time of the flat."

A book that appreciates the author's way of narrating the post-separation mourning period. I had never read anything by this author, and I confess that I really liked his writing style in brief paragraphs, making each of them strong enough to convey a clear and concise message.
A book with many quotes to highlight!
A book to reread always. (Translated from Spanish)

[JoaquinCambalache · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I find it hard to write that I didn't like this highly praised and recognized novel even a little. I finished it only to see if it would pick up at any point, but I really should have abandoned it sooner. It seemed to me like a story that was too stagnant, where it felt like nothing was advancing, and the chapters ended up being all the same. There are interesting phrases and metaphors, that's for sure. But there are way too many descriptions; I would almost say it's pure description. At first, it's fine, but as the pages went by, I grew desperate waiting for something to happen. (Translated from Spanish)

[miplumainconsciente · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

?? A magnificent work from the Cordoban in this first long novel, the protagonist travels to the interior of Buenos Aires after a breakup, experiences grief by going to a remote house in the countryside where he creates a garden. While working the land, planting, digging furrows, battling pests, insects and other complications that arise, he engages in introspective work, intimate in the solitude of the countryside, wanting to find answers, remembering parts of his childhood and reminiscing in a back-and-forth with Ciro.

✍️ "It’s as if in the time of grief there is no narrative."

✍️ "A lot of little things put me in a bad mood. The world is made up of setbacks, things that don’t work, failures in the garden, and lamentations." (Translated from Spanish)

[Jopa20q8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the third novel about "breakups and escapes" to a lonely place that I've read this year (La buena suerte and Un amor). However, the theme is fascinating, as it is a "universal" topic for humans in how we react to difficult situations. In this case, it's in the countryside where the protagonist plants and harvests his garden while reflecting on his life. Well written and a great pleasure to read. Recommended.

Addendum: At first, it may seem boring due to the succession of small rural stories, but as it progresses, it really becomes sad when the reading ends. (Translated from Spanish)

[Mendieta76 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Few books have made me wet, have burned me under the siesta sun, have filled my senses with the smell of rain, wind, and a country night. The rhythm of nature marking the time of mourning, of loss. The cycles of nature in the plain, as the only measure of time. "You can't control a garden and that sometimes frustrates me. The garden does not grow to my desire, but to its own power, the power of the seed, and it happens amid accidents." "It is more or less the same with writing...", says Federico Falco while in the very act of describing, observing, and adopting the rhythm that the plain imposes on him, he writes one of the most beautiful works I have read. The story of the plain, which is ultimately his own, Federico's, mine, and I hope that of many others. A book to treasure. (Translated from Spanish)

[Santyv666 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The passage of time as a huge bridge between yesterday, fundamentally today, and tomorrow.
Details of beautiful delicacy and a very manageable style.
Highly recommended. (Translated from Spanish)

[Csergio89 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A simple and beautiful novel. In it, we can traverse a multitude of emotions through the main character. A writer who has just separated from his partner decides to move to the countryside and dedicate himself to creating a garden where he can find emotional balance in the face of such a recent breakup. For a year, the character navigates between the past, present, and future. Beautiful, lovely, simple, at times entertaining and at times melancholic. Highly recommended. (Translated from Spanish)

[Sebas-A · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At the beginning, the protagonist's anxiety and discontent are noticeable. At times, tedium and melancholy can be felt. A simple and direct prose, sometimes aimed straight at the heart. Through the words, the pain of the protagonist, the narrator in the first person, is palpable. The story moves back and forth in time; from the present to a happy childhood, from the painful recent past to a difficult youth. It takes place in the Argentine pampas with its plains, its vastness, and its endless flatness. With its clear skies and beautiful sunsets. With its oppressive heat without shade. With the relentless cold humidity of winter. With its slow-paced, languid towns. It unfolds between love and heartbreak, in the slow passage of a garden among weeds, shoots, successes, and failures. In the frustration, flow, release, and satisfaction that the act of writing provides. A subtle story that is interesting at times, and slow and tedious at others, just like the life that the protagonist enjoys and suffers. (Translated from Spanish)

[virgiigutierrez · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Who wouldn't have liked to escape like the protagonist, to start a new life from scratch, completely different from the previous one, after a separation? I loved the way the author describes that feeling of loneliness, that everyday sadness that diminishes over time, and the appreciation of simple things. A beautiful book. (Translated from Spanish)

[adriledesma · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Precious. Precious novel!
Sadness, loss, and loneliness narrated with a melancholic beauty that envelops and embraces. To sow, cultivate, harvest. To enrich the land with hope and fill time with nostalgia.
To read, evoke, miss. To write about love, and on love, so that it doesn't get lost.
I noted down memorable phrases and paragraphs and enjoyed it while sighing from beginning to end.
The year has just begun, and I already feel that this will be one of my best reads of 2021! (Translated from Spanish)

[Libristerra · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I only spent two days in the plains of Federico Falco, I would have liked it to be many more, to stay looking at the horizon, the blue of the distance as Rebecca Solnit says in one of her essays; that distance and that solitude so characteristic of the pampa. But the pages flowed with a cadence that transported me to a state like meditation, I could not and did not want to let go of the book, I needed to read it knowing that at this pace the end would soon arrive.

Federico, the protagonist of the story, a writer and from Córdoba like Falco himself, needs to get away, to retreat to the countryside, to tire his body, not to think.

“I have to let the countryside fill me and teach me. I have to learn to look and not try to impose myself.”

Federico must try to understand and accept the distancing imposed by the person he loves. He needs to navigate his grief in solitude. To discover who he really is, what his nature is.

The countryside is not an unknown environment for Federico; as a child he spent a lot of time in similar landscapes with his grandparents. Returning to nature is a return to his roots. And that is how we learn his story, his homeland.

The days in the countryside and the work he imposed on himself to make a garden bear fruit are arduous, exhausting. In a sort of diary, he tells us about each plant, the care it needs, the challenges he must face.

“To tie oneself to something.
To a garden, a forest, a plant.
To tie oneself to something that has roots, to knot oneself so as not to get lost in the wind that blows over the pampa and calls.”

A very moving book, with a sensitivity and simplicity that only Falco can achieve. A story with which I deeply empathized; perhaps because I too decided that my roots would take hold in the countryside, to distance myself from the city to feel more connected to myself. To find myself.

One of the best books I read this year. I needed to return to Falco; too much time had passed since I finished reading his short story collections. Reading Falco is like coming home. (Translated from Spanish)