Faces in the crowd by Valeria Luiselli.

I don’t even know yet.. I wouldn’t say it wasn’t an enjoyable novel but it was very hard to read, or to understand. It was fine during the first part, when the narrator was describing about her life in New York city, all the interesting characters and young adult lives, but I think I lost the flow when the perspectives started to change and Owen started to talk about his life. I even thought the other perspective was from the husband’s until I watched the lecture and got clarification. It probably was the point for the book to be confusing, a non-linear story with changing perspectives, blurred lines and its seemingly unpolished state – and if it was it definitely worked because I was very confused. I suppose it was about a translator being obsessed with an author that the whole narration starts getting blurry and her life starts almost morphing into that of the author’s. Maybe it was a book of maybe’s. Maybe she is a ghost in a living city, maybe everyone else are ghosts, maybe her husband went away, maybe not?? I’m not sure.

As the book says and the lecture quotes,

“I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it”. 

in this structure of holes and loose ends, I’ll talk about what I found interesting. More than the main story about the slow descend to obsession the narrator is going through and the weird coincidences and parallels(?) like the 3 cats :0, I found the different characters to be most interesting. The narrator talks about each of their traits like how they smell (which was very prominent for some reason), their routines inside the apartment, or their mannerisms; they just kind of made me think about the different characters we meet throughout our lives. It is kind of cool but also sad to see the differences of the livelihoods the narrator had in the past versus the present. She would live in a small apartment with a few furnitures, sharing them with others who she would then become friends or lovers with, while in the present in Mexico city, she lives with this responsibility of a mother of two and a husband who I’m not sure if he’s happy in the marriage or not, and she can’t even write her novel in peace without the husband making comments of jealousy on it. It’s also interesting to see how the family members are not named when the ‘characters’ in her past lives all have their names. This makes me wonder if they are truly fictional or not (in the novel). The narrator almost creates this life for Owen from his perspective, talking about the people he meets, his prostitute lover and how he’s fat and almost blind.. so it could be that she was making up these characters in her past life as well. Maybe the real faces in the crowd were not the ghosts but the people she met.. maybe the faces were the friends we made along the way.. (i;m tired)

I found the parallels at the end really cool even though I was not sure what actually was going on, like how Owen had three cats and the narrator with her children were walking around like ‘three little cats’, the buzzing of the flies and mosquitoes and the children’s singing and crying, until it clashes in the end to one when the children finds Papa, or otherwise, Owen? It reminded me of those movies with multiple universes and how they overlap or clash in the end..

My question is:

Who was the most interesting character in your opinion? Mine was definitely Dakota; I really liked their (Dakota and the narrator’s) relationship for some reason.