How to Write a Grieving Body: mourning and nature in Los llanos by Federico Falco

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between mourning and nature in Los llanos by Federico Falco, in order to address the narrator’s central question: how to write a grieving body? Contrary to certain readings —and to the narrator’s own romantic longing— the novel, it is argued here, does not find an answer in agricultural labor or in the temporality of the land. Rather, Los llanos presents, both rhetorically and aesthetically, a profound dissonance between the grieving subject and the surrounding natural world. To develop this idea, the essay focuses on three key axes where this dissonance manifests: language (syntax), time (rhythm), and labor (of mourning, of the field). A close reading reveals that the novel’s strength lies in its unresolved oscillation between the time of the plains and the time of grief, between the untranslatable language of nature and the impossible language of loss. Finally, the analysis of the novel will allow for the development of some reflections on the temporality of grief.