Tag Archives: missed opportunities

Kinda Like the Gag Where There’s a Box Inside of a Box, Inside of a Bigger Box, Except There’s 5 Boxes in the Aforementioned Big Box, and Those Boxes are Broken Into Smaller Pieces of Box, and Scattered Haphazardly Around the Big Box so That It’s Rlly Hard For Your to Figure Out Which Box Pieces Fit Together – Faces In the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

Confusing is a word I would use to describe this book.

Faces In the Crowd was a pretty experimental story and perspective into storytelling and what is true or not.  Even though I can see the appeal in this kind of meta book in a book where you never really know what the author is actually saying and it all makes sense in the end of the book, I personally do not enjoy it and would rather someone tell me a story from start to finish like I am a five year old at library story time.

The one thing that I thought was cool about the fragmented story, however, was how it reflected the main character’s life responsibilities. I read online on a book review that the fragmented storytelling style was meant to represent the main character not being able to consistently write her novel due to her familial responsibilities  and having to put down the book and pick it back up again sporadically.  There is a quote where the main character mentions her inability to further pursue her work as a writer because of her pregnancy, but I cannot remember where it is off the top of my head, and I am running short on time. I think that this feeling of not being able to fully realize your dreams is a feeling that is very real to me in the sense that it happens so often. My mother often tells me about the things that she had to give up on in order to have a family such as moving to New York or pursuing a career in academia. I find that this is something that scares me a lot about the future and I think that this book touched on that in a very unique way.

When I listened to the lecture, a lot of very abstract phrases were thrown around about the things that this book was trying to accomplish, but the one phrase that stuck out to me and kinda confused me was something along the lines of “to continue a career in writing is to continue a career in folding time” (this is a paraphrase pls don’t report me to the academic dishonesty police). I understand that this makes sense in the context of the book, but I personally think that this is confusing as heck and that it’s taking the act of writing words on a page, and trying to make it sound like you’re using alchemy to turn bread into wine. It might be a hot take, but I do not think that the act of writing novels should be so deep that we transcend the human understanding of truth and time. Sometimes I just wanna read a book that makes sense the first time through and can instantly enjoy and not have to ponder and philosophize about.

My question for the class: Do you enjoy consuming rlly tough to understand media or do you like to read more straight forward types of media?

Jonathan