False Calm

"False Calm bears little relation to most travelogues . . . It's not exploration; it's portraiture."—NPR

"False Calm is fascinating, informative, and ultimately a pleasure to read."—World Literature Today

"Style is perfectly suited to subject; Cristoff travels in a land where real meets surreal and curses, superstition, myth, and mysticism are woven into the fabric of everyday life."—Kirkus Reviews

"Personal memoir, travelogue, and history combine in María Sonia Cristoff’s False Calm, a journey that peels back the layers of the ghostly fog blanketing Patagonia to reveal engrossing complexity."—Foreword Reviews

“Cristoff is far from being just another writer. She is, on the contrary, a magnificent example of a chronicler-essayist narrator: a unique species of those who are possibly on the way to extinction."—Alejandra Costamagna

“Outstanding, fun, insightful.”—Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“A brilliant journalistic investigation."—Denis Scheck, ARD Tagesthemen

“Captivating, intelligent, where the silent strength reaches beyond the real at hand."—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“A marvelous book with literary reportage, possibly one of the best books to come of the hundreds of new translations from Argentinean literature."—Süddeutsche Zeitung

“Impressive literary quality. A profoundly disquieting image of the Argentinean Patagonia and beyond."—Monika Thees, Die Berliner Literaturkritik