Week 12- Faces in the Crowd
Hello everyone! As we are soon approaching the end of the semester it is truly crazy to see how fast it has all gone. This course taught me so much about myself as a reader and pushed me to move past my comfort zone with reading to experience texts that I would have maybe never picked for myself. As we move to our last book I can say I did not enjoy reading but I am starting to open up to it.
This week’s book “Faces in the Crowd” by Valeria Luiselli was actually quite a whirlwind to follow. To be honest I did not like this book very much. It was quite hard to follow. This book is broken into pieces of stories that do not follow the traditional storyline progression and rather can be seen as perhaps more than just one book. This story is about a woman in New Mexico who draws on times in life in New York City. Perhaps what we interpret as a woman before her married life. She is a reader and translator who has these strange friends and lives this disorganized but wanderous life. The second part of the second book is about Gilberto Owen who is a Mexican poet but also lives in New York. As his life passes he wants to write a book about a woman “who remains eternally locked up in her house [. . .] talking with her ghosts and trying to piece together a series of broken thoughts” (137); This idea that is already being pursued seemed like a perfect capture of the book we are reading. To me, it seems like we are already reading this book.
The narrator writes this book as a horizontal novel, narrated vertically” (69) rather what we see as fragments but this leaves the readers with uncertainty and varied perspectives. What is real and what is not? The boundaries in this book make us question what we can trust to be fact or fiction. For instance when the husband reads the writing and assumes it is about him but she says it is fiction. However, I think it points to something that is drawn from both the women and Owen, which is the idea of memory. I feel this represents the conflicted nature of memories. When we look back on our lives we can only remember pieces of our life. We think back on those moments and memories that reflect something important rather than a course progression of our lives. Furthermore, our memories are not always perfect. Just as this book, life is not a linear progression and our memories can only serve as a fragment of our life.
My question for this week is how did you like this book? Was it easy for you to follow?
Jasmeen, glad to see you’ve had some time to reflect on the course! Just to clarify – this woman is NOT in New Mexico but rather in Mexico City (capital of Mexico the country!). Love the point you made about memory, would loved to hear more about that analysis: how do you see memory be accurate or not accurate in the novel? Are there any moments where we as the reader can see this point about memories being imperfect in either narrative?
Thanks for your comment!
– Tesi
Hi Jasmeen! I honestly didn’t really like this book, I found it quite boring and somewhat hard to follow with the 2 storylines going at the same time