|
María Sonia Cristoff Argentina
|
|
María Sonia Cristoff was born in Trelew, Patagonia, in
1965. Since the early 1980s she has lived in Buenos Aires where she studied
Language and Literature. For years now
Christoff has applied herself to the literature of Patagonia, published Acento
extranjero (“Foreign Accent”), an anthology of historical travelogues, in
2000, and the volume Patagonia
in 2005, in which various authors portray their villages in southern Argentina.
With Falsa calma (“Deceptive Calm”), which she wrote thanks to a
scholarship of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes, she advanced to become
an outstanding ambassador for the narrative non fiction of her country. The
author writes for the newspaper La Nación on a regular basis.
Falsa calma – Un recorrido por pueblos fantasmas de
la Patagonia
(“Deceptive Calm, Patagonia’s haunted Villages”) is a travelogue which aims to
track down Patagonian conditions of living without following in the line of
Chatwin’s creation of myths. The emphasis is not on the meagreness and vastness
of the countryside, which has now almost become a cliché, but on isolated
villages, which are swept through by the winds and seem like ghost towns at
first sight. And so María Sonia Cristoff becomes part of the village Cañadón
Seco, the first stop of her journey. As she waits endlessly for a bus, she
meets people, enters their lives for a short while and listens to stories. She stays much longer than intended and it
is the sudden aggression of the stray dogs that tells her it is time to leave.
There are recurring moments where the chronicler turns from observer into the
observed. Her refreshingly different report is a blend of essay and literary
narration which includes quotes of old travel reports, newspaper articles as
well as autobiographical elements. It is also a journey back to her childhood,
from which she clearly remembers a general feeling of being forgotten by the
world, which is so widely spread among the people of Patagonia.
Novels:
Falsa calma - Un
recorrido por pueblos fantasmas de la Patagonia
Buenos Aires: Seix Barral
2005, 221 p.
Germany: Berenberg
Desubicados, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana 2006
Anthology:
Pasaje a Oriente. Narrativa de viajes de escritores argentinos
(Ed. by María
Sonia Cristoff)
Buenos Aires: Fondo de
Cultura Económica 2009, 424 p.