With this being the last week of reading for this course, I’ve read 11 books throughout this which greatly surprised me since I am not an avid reader in any way and still the books here some I found fairly interesting. Back to this week’s reading, Valeria Luiselli’s novel “Faces in the Crowd” offers an unconventional storytelling approach through its fragmented narratives that mix the lines between reality and fiction. However, this did not occur to me till more than halfway through the book and because of this, it made me extremely confused about what was going on. The book speaks about the stories of an unnamed female writer juggling her creative ambitions with family obligations as a wife and mother, and Gilberto Owen, a Mexican poet and diplomat from the 1920s.
As the stories progress, the author and character’s narratives become interlinked through a “horizontal novel, told vertically”. For example, Owen contemplates writing about a “woman locked in her house,” mirroring the protagonist’s confined experiences. This meta-fictional element got me thinking about the correlation between the psyches of creators and their creations.
The non-linear, fragmented structure reflects the messy nature of memories and the protagonist’s conflicting roles across different times and places. I found the way Luiselli merges the plotlines made it unclear if the ghosts haunting the woman are real or manifestations of her psyche. Even after watching the lecture which helped explain the book’s motivations for jumping around timelines, I still struggled in certain parts to fully connect the two narrative threads.
As the semester’s final reading assignment, “Faces in the Crowd” made me realize just how challenging and confusing a literary work can be, but that’s not a completely bad thing since for this book trying to figure out the two different story timelines while also trying to understand the plot was a different but also interesting experience for me.
From this book, I’ve realized that the description of the book relates to how we exist in our own minds differs from how we exist in the minds of others. We constantly retell our own stories in fragments, picking up memories, slightly changing them with each retelling, and relating them to our present situation. Everyday life does not go on smoothly in a linear progression, it’s more like subconsciously ordered fragments of memory that are connected to the present.
Discussion Question:
Are Owen’s glimpses of her on the subway truly happening or conjured by her fascination with him?
“I’ve read 11 books”
Congratulations! And for someone who claims to be confused, I think you’ve understood a lot of this book!
“I found the way Luiselli merges the plotlines made it unclear if the ghosts haunting the woman are real or manifestations of her psyche.”
Yes, it might be worth going through the novel to think of the different kinds of ghosts that it features. For instance, we’re told that there’s a ghost haunting the house in Mexico City (the boy calls it “Without”). But it’s a friendly sort of ghost, it seems. And then, for instance, there are the ghosts on the New York subway, which seem to be more personal and more particular… the ghosts of Owen (for the female narrator) and of the narrator (for Owen).
Note there’s also an allusion (with the child, Dolores Preciado) to a book by a Mexican novelist, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, which is a book in which all the characters are dead.
Jerry, I’m so glad you were able to reflect on the semester! 11 books is pretty impressive, congratulations! I think your point between a creator’s psyche and their creation is an interesting one! It definitely has a space in literary traditions (first thing that came to mind was Frankenstein with not only Mary Shelly’s writing but the creature and the doctor). In fact, I think part of the narrative is that each of the writers in the stories also write themselves in a way. I also think you provided a good interpretation of this theem in relation to the ghosts
Thanks for your comment!
– Tesi