A Foreign Country is the Past by Fernando Sdrigotti

A Foreign Country is the Past by Fernando Sdrigotti – Influx Press, 2025

Look, let’s open with some radical honesty: short stories aren’t a form of writing I ever really get excited about.

Why is that?

Unfortunately, I know the answer, and it’s not pretty. The reason why I, scott manley hadley, fail to regularly get excited about short fiction is due to centuries of in-built cultural rot from my sad inheritance of being English.

I read short stories all the time! And often I enjoy them a lot!

Yet! Yet yet yet, I almost always feel surprised when this happens… Like I’ve done a good and a well-behaved thing.

I feel as if reading short stories is the equivalent of a child with culinarily-ignorant parents being successfully chivvied into eating poorly-cooked yet nutrient-rich vegetables.

Yet I love eating vegetables, and that isn’t something I grew up doing…

Why have I matured into an adult who loves eating vegetables in spite of my provincial English origins, yet haven’t escaped the same sociocultural trappings w/r/t short stories?

Ultimately, alas, it’s because I’m just not good enough to do it.

Though…

I don’t think it’s necessarily that I don’t like short stories. I also rarely get excited about collections of poems that lack an overarching-narrative link. Or non-linked essay collections. 

I just like texts that last somewhere between 100 and 200 pages and cohere around one central “story” (though a thousand themes and ideas can be there) better than any other kind of text (wiggle room is fine, and some of the texts I’ve loved the most have far exceeded that (e.g. Doris Lessing’s two five novel cycles, Proust, other stuff like that).

So, it was with some trepidation that I returned, once again, to a collection of short fiction by Fernando Sdrigotti.

Because this isn’t a secret novel masquerading as a collection of short stories.

This isn’t short stories recounting episodes from a single life or family. And though some locations, vaguely, overlap, they don’t do so in such a way that they’re what would be known online as “Easter eggs” – it’s merely that the locations are shared, much as you wouldn’t read a 1950s novel set in London and see a geographical similarity with a setting in a Dickens novel and presume an intentional overlap… Or maybe you would. I dunno. I don’t know what people expect any more.¹

Unlike Sdrigotti’s earlier book, Dysfunctional Males, this is not an East London book, though – as with that earlier text – place does hold a significance, an importance. Here, though, it isn’t the hip parts of London where the still-cool Sdrigotti has spent most of his adulthood, but the Argentina where the pre-cool (or cool?) Sdrigotti spent his childhood and youth.

(((I need to clarify before moving on – Sdrigotti today (2025) might technically be “still recently-cool” or “recently still-cool” as well as also (potentially) “cool”. It’s always hard to judge others’ coolness because one also ages, and though I don’t think I’d consider myself “still-cool”, I also don’t think I’d see myself as “still recently-cool”, and though I’m roughly a decade younger than Sdrigotti, it’s not the decade that counts – a person who manages to be “still-cool” in their mid-30s is more likely to be “still-cool” in their mid-40s, and arguably less likely to be “recently still-cool”. Which is, of course, different to being still recently-cool… This all reminds me of that statistic you hear about people who reach 90 being more, not less, likely to reach 95. Like, the likelihood of longevity increases the longer you live. Cool is like that. So, yes, perhaps I haven’t been recently cool for a while…)))

–///–

A Foreign Country is the Past is short fiction.

Short stories, all – to my knowledge – set in Argentina, the place of Sdrigotti’s birth and youth, though he’s been London-based for – to my understanding from the author bio – about half of his life by the point of this book’s publication.

So, the Argentina that arises is a nostalgic one, is a setting distant in time as well as place from the Hackney bookshops where Influx Press titles get the best displays…

But that doesn’t mean what we see is mere recycled anecdotes and evocations of what could conceivably be Sdrigotti’s childhood (though a later piece about an Argentina-born long-term London-resident visiting Argentina for a family funeral does seem to have more in common with the author bio than most of the rest of the book), far from it.

There are pieces here about all sorts of ideas, such as ‘Colour Theory’, which is grief and accidents and overlapping lives centred around mentions of colour and art and opportunity and tragedy… there’s ‘A Sense of Impending Doom’ which is about privatised religion and set in a twisted contemporary world… There are pieces about working in a call centre, about the closure of small businesses and the rise of organised crime… there are pieces about casual alcoholism and traffic deaths, centred around the ignorance we have around the ways we are seen (and forgotten) by other people)… there are pieces about quiet family tragedies… and about loud ones, too…

And it all coalesces into this beautiful, tight, collection that leads one to think about youth and ageing, about regret and shame, about blissful celebration of one’s chiefest memories and about the ways in which we see ourselves and others see us…

There are stories about life and death and about grief and disinterest. About travel and stasis and ageing and, well, most of capitalised Art’s other big themes.

It’s a powerful body of work, absolutely, and the question I have to ask myself is, am I so simple-minded that if a sentence were inserted into each story to connect the people and the lives together into one supposedly shared narrative, would I have liked the book more?

The answer to that question, alas, is one I cannot answer, because I fear that were I to do so, I would expose the hypocrisies and the ignorance and the stupidity that ferments at the very heart of my useless, broken, English, readerly soul (if I even have a soul).

Recommended, of course, though not if you only read novels. Because it isn’t one.

A Foreign Country is the Past by Fernando Sdrigotti – Influx Press, 2025

1. Historically, at least, people wouldn’t have done this. Though maybe this would be different for those today whose recreational media is more MCU than Influx Press. ↩︎