Include Me Out

October 28, 2019
Argentinian writer Cristoff’s second book to be translated into English (after False Calm) is a dark, funny novel—part psychological thriller, part social satire, part crime caper—about a simultaneous interpreter who takes a vow of silence and a job at a provincial museum west of Buenos Aires. Mara is in her late 30s when her career as an interpreter at international conferences ends abruptly following an incident at a summit: she stops translating a philanthropist’s speech and instead recites from her own manual on how to use spoken and unspoken communications to manipulate and maneuver, implicating the philanthropist, his audience, and even the interpreters. Afterwards, determined to speak as little as possible for a year, Mara finds work as a security guard at the Udaondo Museum in Luján, founded in the 1920s to preserve local heritage. Her duties include guarding the Means of Transportation Room, which features two taxidermied horses, Mancha and Gato. An unwelcome promotion to assistant helping the taxidermist hired to repair Mancha and Gato provides Mara with the opportunity to use her planning and preparation skills for an act of sabotage that leaves the newly repaired horses in ruins. Cristoff cites jokes and historical documents, contrasts provincialism and cosmopolitanism, while devoting her most acute observations to the meaninglessness of words and the meanings of silence. This is a striking, clever novel.

January 1, 2020
A former simultaneous interpreter devotes herself to a year of silence. Argentine author Cristoff (False Calm: A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia, 2018, etc.) writes of Mara, who takes a job as a guard in a small Argentinian town's museum following a professional debacle, envisioning a year of silence as atonement, reflection, and resistance: "She sits in her museum guard chair and watches--silent, ecstatic, with no interruptions of any kind." Mara, whose story is interspersed with excerpted passages from literary and historical sources she's copied into her notebook, develops a strict code for the year. "One of the key protocols of the experiment she came to this town to carry out is to not ask questions. To speak the absolute minimum, and, above all, to never ask questions. One year, that's all. One year of practicing the art of keeping quiet." Mara manages by nodding, grumbling, and letting others fill the space. Her silence is anything but passive. "Muteness is also the art of a still body...remaining silent is important as a paradoxical speech act." There is "eloquence implicit in this business of remaining silent, and she enjoys it doubly, out of revenge, rage, and vengeance." Cristoff plays with ideas of speech, pause, and power. Mara was a skilled interpreter, and she becomes skilled in more laconic arts. Eventually, she is recruited from her post to help in the embalming of two valuable horses at the museum. Her own silence, "a discipline of the body," and the stillness of the beasts stand in contrast to the chatty, idiosyncratic taxidermist. It was an act of sabotage that ended Mara's career as an interpreter, and it is another act of sabotage that occupies her mind during the project. Silence as reflexive communication is, in many ways, similar to the way Mara sees taxidermy: "Here there is art, here there is science, and here there is great respect for the original." A poignant little story that will give you pause.

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