It is often hard to express how we feel in words. The seeming incompatibility between overused, insufficient language and the boundless emotional worlds it’s asked to contain often appears irreconcilable, particularly when floods of emotion rush in. For a writer, someone who thinks and lives and works in relation to linguistic representation, the divide between an experience and its expression, “the space between mind and flesh,” can become a chasm, nearly impossible to bridge. 

In his latest book The Plains (Charco Press, 2024), translated from Spanish by Jennifer Croft, Federico Falco reveals a narrator on one side of this rift, at a loss for how to overcome such distance. The novel follows the protagonist who, fresh from a breakup, decides to move to the Argentine countryside, rent a small house, and cultivate a garden. There, surrounded by emptiness, wildness, and possibility, Fede considers the unknown expanse of his future. 

Away from the city where he lived with his long-term partner, the narrator must confront the quiet mundanity and vast immensity of rural life in Zapiola. Fede, a writer, keeps notebooks that chronicle this season of his life. He documents the vegetables he plants, how they fare, the birds he sees darting through the sky, the chickens he keeps, the things he reads. Interspersed with quotations from artists like Annie Dillard and Anish Kapoor, he reflects on memory, writing, and storytelling, always with the “landscape as mirror.”

Tracked chronologically by month, the novel unfolds as Fede relates detail by detail the sparse relentlessness of being on the plains—a place where “the landscape predominates, contaminates all, invades all”—presenting a life dictated by the seasons and moving at the pace of heartbreak. 

Fede brings his past and his future under his writerly gaze, feeling unmoored by the sudden loss of the story he’d built over years, his life a “like a drawing that slowly, day by day, gets formed on a blank sheet.” When his history fractures, he seeks the openness of the plains: “It was a space where I could find myself . . . where I could read myself.” As he relinquishes the story he’d been telling himself, he comes around to “simply narrating, not trying to understand as you go.” By virtue of fragments of thought floating in ample white space, Fede invites himself and the reader into a presence of mind that allows for deep self-exploration, surrender, and illumination. 

Falco’s graceful novel patiently displays the narrator’s constant wrestle with language and self-construction, along with the ways they coalesce and diverge. Fede attempts “to get as close as possible to finding names for things” that are ineffable or untranslatable resonate with the reality of the human condition, while also highlighting the intricate, rich fruits of Croft’s translation. The narrator keeps his eye attuned to both the visible and invisible, whether it be the distant horizon of the plains or words gone unspoken in the past. Croft renders clear language without over-clarification, prompting readers to inscribe their experiences on the story, just as she materializes Falco’s invisible language and its felt treatment of life’s bittersweetness.

As the novel progresses, it becomes evident that the storytelling’s aim is neither to wring meaning from the novel nor to imbue it with meaning. Rather, it is to inhabit a space and imbue it with one’s presence. 

The gulf between the representation of language and the nonverbal significance it tries to embody is of particular interest to translator and theorist Clive Scott, who asserts that “the pertinent question for the reader is not ‘Do you understand it?’, but ‘What understanding have you come to with it?’” The Plains affords readers countless opportunities not only to posit this question, but also to discover the uniquely enriching answer awaiting them within its pages.