The WorldI Inhabit
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Territories of the work
Questions that also arise from the landscape.
The territory within the novel
In The World I Inhabit: When Words Are Not Needed, the territory does not function solely as a setting. Weather, distances, water, buildings, and sounds determine what each character can perceive, fear, and understand.
This section stops at the territories present from the beginning of the novel. Other spaces are part of its journey, but naming them or explaining their importance would anticipate events that belong to the reading experience.
These pages do not attempt to exhaustively describe Patagonia or Europe during the war. They explore the particular form that these territories acquire within the novel and the relationship they establish with its characters.
Two initial territories
A territory that the body must learn.
Sea, wind, cold, canals, forests and islands make up a world that cannot be known only through maps. In the Patagonia of the novel, finding your way requires reading the currents, recognizing the changes in the air, and learning what a body can sustain before reaching its limit. Patagonia is a vast region at the southern end of South America, shared today by Chile and Argentina. Its far south brings together channels, fjords, islands, forests, and steppes. The Kawésqar and Yagán are distinct Indigenous peoples with maritime traditions, while the Aónikenk are historically associated with the continental steppes. The novel approaches parts of these worlds through fiction; it does not claim to replace the voices of these peoples or their own cultural sources. For readers in the English-speaking world, Patagonia lies at the far southern end of the Americas; it is neither an imaginary wilderness nor a culturally empty landscape.
Explore Patagonia → 02 — EUROPE AT WARLondon and the destruction of a habitable world.
War does not only destroy buildings. It also breaks the trust between a person and the place they knew. For Vincent, London remains in the smoke, the sounds and the reactions of a body that continues to wait for the next collapse.
Explore Europe at war →The novel traverses other spaces, times and ways of living. They are not developed in this section because discovering them—and understanding the relationship they establish with each other—is part of the story.
The official site deliberately preserves that route.
Discover the beginning of the novel without anticipating the territories that belong to its journey.
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