Description
A map of the places we fall into is an intimate and fragmentary field notebook, a book of literary non-fiction in which professional observation is put aside to make way for what happens on the periphery. Through short scenes, scattered and deeply human, the author records what happens while the world happens: war, exile, life in conflict contexts, bad love, the blame, fear, the desire and tenderness that persists in the margins of your life.
From hospitals in Pakistan and Kenya to a theater in Jerusalem, passing through cemeteries in Cairo or the home in Heidelberg, This book does not aspire to explain the reason for the trips or the work of its author., but to listen to the noise that life makes when everything happens. The facts are not narrated, but what is left out of the reports: The looks, the minimal gestures, conversations that do not appear in any official record and that, however, they hold the essential.
With lyrical prose, direct and honest, María writes about feelings in different geographical coordinates, about the body in every context and about the sadness that is not always told. A map of the places we fall is, especially, a book about shared vulnerability: about how we all fall into similar places, even if we do it in different geographies.
This hybrid text—halfway between a narrative essay, the field diary and the confession—proposes an ethics of looking and listening, and vindicates the value of the seemingly insignificant as a form of resistance. Because on the margins, where nothing is expected, almost everything still happens.
