Life Is Made Up of Looking
Reviews
By Cory Oldweiler
If you’ve been fortunate enough to find love, you’ve probably felt the pain of losing it. These emotions could be tied not only to a romance, but to the love of a friend, a family member, a pet, a home, a favorite watering hole, a TV show, a character. So many things can create a void when they’re gone, can make it feel as if you lost a piece of yourself when they went away. And while it indeed may be better to have loved than not, aphorisms are little consolation for the inescapable ache you can feel when you’re enduring the loss of love.
The narrator of Federico Falco’s debut novel Los llanos is one such lovesick sufferer. Feeling broken after the end of a seven-year relationship, he trades Buenos Aires, where he and his ex had built a life together, for an isolated rental in the “sudden and spectacular” plains of Argentina’s Córdoba province, where he grew up. Originally published in 2020, this aching and contemplative novel is now available in a wonderful English translation by Jennifer Croft titled The Plains. As with her 2021 translation of Falco’s underappreciated story collection A Perfect Cemetery (originally published in Spanish as Un cementerio perfecto in 2016), Croft is unfailingly attentive to the mood and pacing of The Plains, crafting a sensitive and considered translation that entangles the reader in the narrator’s sorrows and introspection while also letting them share his comforts when they come.
The story takes the form of a loosely structured journal jotted down, appropriately enough, over nine months, from the onset of a scorching, sere summer in January through the tentative stirrings of rebirth in the early spring of September. The narrator, an author named Federico, has settled about two miles outside of Zapiola—“more emptiness than town”—seeking distraction as much as anything: “All I want now is to watch the horizon, the plains, to stare into the distance, let the countryside inundate me, let the sky fill me up, not to think, so that what’s happening inside me ceases to exist all the time.” Unable to write and yearning to feel that he is fostering life, Federico commits himself to building a vegetable garden, a “dress rehearsal” for something more long term, more permanent one day. Other than his neighbor Luiso, who tends sheep and cows in the surrounding pastures, Federico’s only daily companions are the fauna that he catalogs early on—a tabby cat, two hares, several iguanas—plus “a thousand infestations” brought on by the heat and drought, resulting in “ants, birds, caterpillars, creepy-crawlies everywhere.”
What little narrative momentum there is comes mainly from the changing seasons. Federico changes too, slowly putting himself back together as he adapts to the enervating heat, the drenching rains, and the slowdown of winter. Throughout it all, he remains steadfastly attentive to the natural world around him and especially his garden. The Plains includes a great deal of quotidian gardening commentary that I have to imagine will be tremendously enjoyable to green thumbs. But even if you could somehow kill an artificial orchid, the horticultural passages are entrancing. You await the periodic updates on the latest crop of radishes, and take vicarious pride the day that Federico at last has learned they “must be planted in rows, in full sun, when the moon is waning, and they have to be thinned as soon as possible.”
Gardening is also used as an explicit metaphor for various aspects of Federico’s life. It is tied to his writing, which “requires chaos, uncertainty, turmoil. It’s something that grows, like the chard at the top: messy and up.” And it is contrasted with his past interest in “controlling the shape of things” via ceramics: “I used to think that stories needed to be treated like clay. Now I wonder if you could write the way you make a garden.” His successes and failures in the soil are stand-ins for his attempts to nourish his broken heart as well. “I get mad at the plants, as though they were doing this to me on purpose, as though they were to blame.”
Federico’s teenaged, orphaned great-grandfather escaped to Argentina from the Piedmont region of Italy at the onset of World War I, and successive generations continued to speak Piedmontese among themselves as they raised cattle and farmed wheat, flax, corn, and eventually soybeans. Returning to the pampas reminds Federico of both his childhood in the small town of Cabrera and the weekends on his grandparents’ farm. At that time, doing the rounds with his Uncle Tonito, checking the fence line, looking over the livestock and the fields, felt like a “meaningless routine,” but as he develops his own gardening rituals in Zapiola, Federico’s perspective changes. He recalls his grandfather’s wake and the box of loose photos that his grandma kept on the highest shelf of the closet. Sitting together, she could tell him the story behind any photo he chose, but left to himself, he needed to impose order on the memories, sorting and organizing them into a narrative, trying to make them tell a story.
Strewn throughout these reminiscences are apposite quotations from a dozen or so authors Federico is reading, ranging from Argentine luminaries like Sara Gallardo and Hebe Uhart to British novelist Barbara Pym and American poet Louise Glück. One such quotation comes from a poem by Falco’s Córdoban contemporary Elena Anníbali: “If you flee / the around here devours you / if you remain / the around here assimilates you / bestows on you the title of native son.” Federico is the only member of his family to have fled the region, driven by the desire to avoid assimilation and instead to have “a life like the ones I read about in books, a life like the ones in the magazines.” He also wanted to have the freedom to be open in his sexuality, which he fought to hid while growing up, “not even admitting it to myself so as not to put myself at risk of death.” This very real fear and the ways it continues to poison his relationship with his parents calls to mind Selva Almada’s Brickmakers, a novel about malignant masculinity and the bullying of gay men. Almada’s work is generally set to the east of Córdoba, in Entre Ríos, but brickyards play an important symbolic role in The Plains for how they enable survival, adhere to the seasons, and ultimately exhaust the land.
When the cold weather settles in and life “revolves around the stove,” Federico starts to confront his former relationship in writing, starts to sort out “how to write a story amid the wreckage of a history.” Ciro, his ex, is a city boy who was born and raised in Buenos Aires, someone who was able to be open about his sexuality, including around his family. Federico sketches how they met and how their relationship evolved, but he can’t finish the picture because he’ll “never understand what happened” at the end. Falco has said that there are parts of The Plains that are closer to his own biography, and Federico, just before starting to discuss Ciro, observes that “sometimes, fiction is the only way to think about what’s true.” I am in no position to divine what aspects of Federico’s story align with Falco’s experience, but the passages about Ciro have an unquantifiable element of realism that makes them incredibly affecting.
In no small part, this poignancy is thanks to Croft. Many of the scenes in The Plains feel like slow cinema, leisurely contemplative takes where “life [. . .] is made up of looking,” and that starts with Croft’s translation embracing Falco’s often very deliberate pacing: “Cabrera. A sunny day. Cloudless sky. South wind. Very cold. Guadal. Dry. The kind of light that hurts at noon.” Falco’s imagery and sentiments are frequently lyrical, and Croft’s translation revels in those subtleties, as with the slant rhyme concluding both sentences in Federico’s recollection of approaching his grandparents’ farm: “The memory of the truck’s lights as they revealed the road. The light proceeds meter by meter, devouring the darkness, discovering new tracks in the black.” Conjuring doves in flight, Croft reveals what could be a stanza from a longer poem: “The doves’ flight is quiet. You can only guess they’re there by the faint buzz of wings in the white, milky air.”
There are two lists of words in The Plains that are left untranslated, which is a welcome and enlightening decision. The first list is in Piedmontese, and Federico points out that they’re the only words in that language that he ever learned, words he only knows how to spell phonetically. Leaving them untranslated puts readers in the same situation as Federico, forced to sound them out. The second list comprises Federico’s favorite words in Spanish, but he presents them solely as “words to look at.” The English-speaking reader is forced to do exactly that, look without understanding and, in doing so, become complicit in Federico’s desire “to stay quiet. Not to speak. Not to write. Not to do anything, for a long time.”
Anyone who has been through heartache knows that this need to stop is an essential part of starting to move forward, of starting to not wake up every morning with “something akin to despair.” Near the end of the novel, Federico meets Wendel, the owner of a “forest rectangle” that he walks past on the backroads into Zapiola. Wendel has plenty of horticultural advice after twenty years of tending to the private Eden that he built atop the “scorched earth” consumed by brickmakers, but his best advice to the forty-two-year-old Federico is that he is “too young to stay” in the pampas. Doing nothing has to be a temporary state; a long time can’t turn into forever. The Plains ends with an immensely moving month of September, and Federico’s future seems bright but ambiguous. It has been eight years since Falco last published a story collection. I hope that he too, like his narrator, can once again find his way to telling stories and being at peace with that path.
Cory Oldweiler is an itinerant writer who focuses on literature in translation. In 2022, he served on the long-list committee for the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural Barrios Book in Translation Prize. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Star Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, and other publications.
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