Federico Falco's Perfect Cemetery
In a set of short stories set in the province of Cordoba, Federico Falco lays out a rural Argentinian landscape populated by characters in pivotal periods of their lives. In an established short story tradition, that never comes in the form of radical change, be it in forced upon by external forces internal impulses or dramatic changes of heart. Instead, what is so beautifully captured in these stories is the gradual and almost imperceptible rise of a subtle tension between the inner and outer worlds of the characters.
James Joyce characterised the goal, or the end, of his short stories as a sort of epiphany, an approach also favoured by Raymond Carver. Falco on the other hand goes for a more subtle style and tone, where you can’t exactly put your finger on the critical moment, and neither can the characters themselves. In “King of the Hares” a man has long ago decided to abandon the life he led in his hometown in favour of the company of hares and other animals in the forest. The pivotal moment comes when someone from his past comes to find him in his solitary life. For her it’s an opportunity to decide whether she wants to ask him to come back to live in the town or accept the present paradigm, and for the titular character it’s an opportunity to reconsider his choice. it’s not grand, it’s mot melodramatic; it just is.
In “A Perfect Cemetery” the mayor of a small town and his centenarian father have the opportunity to revisit their relationship, stay on the same course as they’ve been on for the past twenty years or come closer, while the architect designing the town’s cemetery finds in the process an opportunity to consider his personal life, which seems too have taken a back seat to his nomadic freelance work commitments. It’s not an epiphany, but a chance to make a change, or at least a decision, that build the crescendos of each of these stories.
The settings are always small and rural, the characters living in communities reliant on absolute interaction, those famous towns where everyone knows everything about everyone else like in a Giuseppe Tornatore film, emphasising the magnitude of these decisions and possible futures these characters are presented with. It’s reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s settings, but without the overwhelming pressure of feeling stuck.
It takes a talented translator to transpose all this into English while maintaining that quintessential spirit of the original. In an afterword, translator Jennifer Croft writes about a particular word choice she made: translating hermoso not as charming or beautiful, but as swell. Her piece tries to answer the question of representing a place through speech, but also bluntly shows that the job and craft of a translator is worlds apart from that of a dictionary.
