‘A Perfect Cemetery’ by Federico Falco: Short Stories about Community and Isolation in Rural Argentina By Will Huddleston | 07 April, 2021
According the writer G.K. Chesterton, “the man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world”, a point which ought to be remembered throughout
A Perfect Cemetery, the fourth collection of short stories from Federico Falco. The Argentinian – who also has a novel and book of poems to his name – places his characters far from the madding crowd, scattered in tiny hamlets and small towns across his native Córdoba. In these little worlds, Falco poses big questions, inviting us to consider the various meanings of community, the effects of solitude and insularity, and the bonds we form with the natural world.
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A PERFECT Cemetery (Charco Press, £9.99) is Argentinean writer Federico Falco s fourth collection of short stories, and it’s one of his most accomplished.Unlike many of the better-known short-story writers from Argentina, Falco was not born in Buenos Aires but in Cordoba, a province in the centre of the country surrounded by mountains, sierras and lakes, and it this supposedly idyilic landscape that shapes each of the stories in the collection.
They flow with a slow and hypnotic rhythm, with the brilliant clarity now associated with Falco’s refined style.
Particularly striking are The Hares, in which a mysterious hunter spends his days hidden in the mountains, his cave or in front of the altar that he built with the bones of the eponymous animals; and Silvi and Her Dark Night, in which the bored protagonist abandons her Catholic faith in order to get closer to a handsome Mormon, rebelling against her oppressive mother and the social conventions of her sleepy town as she does s
Our Favorite International Reads of 2020 (and What We’ll Be Reading in 2021)
Editor
This year, I m keeping my recommendations to the Southern Cone, perhaps out of the wistful recollection that as we face gray, blustery afternoons here in New York, warmer climes hold elsewhere.
Daniel Tunnard s
Escapes(Unnamed Press), set in a world in which competitive Scrabble is a globally televised craze under the thumb of the Scrafia (yes, a Scrabble mafia), is an uproarious novel staked on the final encounter between former world champs Florence Satine and Buenaventura Escobar in Argentina s Tigre Delta. Told from the alternating viewpoints of Satine and Escobar as they seek to flee the Scrafia s long arm, this clever novel reads something like the imagined result had Piglia turned his attentions to competitive board games. Tunnard s book is a satisfying read that takes Alfred Mosher Butt s tame pastime and turns it into a brisk, riveting jaunt across languages, crime scenes, and