Month: March 2026

Faces in the Crowd was definitely my favorite book we have read so far. It gave me a strange but interesting feeling, mostly because parts of the narrator’s life felt surprisingly relatable. When she describes her younger self living alone in New York, it made me think about what it means to be a young Latin American girl in a big western city. Her life and the stories she tells feel random and really fun, but also relatable in some way. She moves between apartments, lends keys to friends, sleeps in borrowed rooms, and even steals furniture at some point. It feels very “in your twenties,” where nothing is fully settled yet and life is mostly improvised.

“I would lend my apartment to people and seek out other rooms, borrowed armchairs, shared beds in which to spend the night. I gave copies of my keys to a lot of people. They gave me copies of theirs. Reciprocity, not generosity.”(7)

To me, it captures perfectly the feeling of being a foránea, living in a place that isn’t fully yours, where friends or lovers are your network of support. 

One thing I also really enjoyed about the novel was the narration itself. The story constantly moves between different timelines and compared to other books we have read in this course, I actually did not find this confusing at all. Instead, the fragmented structure made the story feel dynamic and unpredictable. The novel constantly blurs the line between truth and fiction. The narrator is writing about her past, but we never fully know which parts actually happened and which parts might be invented. I especially liked how the narrator’s husband reads the pages she is writing and questions them. At one point he asks, “Did you use to sleep with women?” (39), which made me laugh because it shows how even the characters inside the story are unsure about what is real. There are also moments where the narrator casually drops things that make you question EVERYTHING, like when she mentions “the kisses I gave my girlfriend’s boyfriend; the ones I gave my girlfriend” (45), which again blurs the line between confession or lies.

Another thing that stood out to me was the casual relationship with ghosts. The narrator mentions a ghost named Without who lives in their house, saying, “Sometimes Without rocks the baby while I’m writing. Neither of us is frightened by this, and we know it’s not a joke” (13). The narrator and her husband do not treat the ghost as something shocking or terrifying. Instead, it feels almost normal, like part of everyday life– very Latin American I would say.

I also liked the humorous tone throughout the book, especially the ironic tone. It is interesting how it is used to make kind of a social commentary (maybe?). For example, when describing her boss White, she says: “And in contrast to the majority of gringos who speak Spanish and have spent some time in Latin America and think that gives them a kind of international third-world experience that confers on them the intellectual and moral qualifications for—I don’t quite know what—White really did understand the fucked-up mechanisms of Latin American literary history” (27). Or the description of  “trustafarians,” which the narrator uses to describe certain Latin Americans who come from money but perform a kind of activist or bohemian lifestyle abroad, as if they could not actually afford it.

I was left with a doubt, actually many doubts but this is the main one. This novel felt kind of autobiographical, and I wonder, if the novel actually is about Luiselli’s life, and if Luiselli did actually work translating novels when she was younger, why didn’t she translate hers?

I think my first thought after finishing this story was how strange the situation felt, but also how familiar it seemed in a different way. Nowadays, people gather, have dinner, talk about random things, and often avoid discussing politics, even when the political situation around the world feels chaotic or upside down. The difference is that today we usually avoid those conversations because they are considered awkward or “impolite.” In The Trenchcoat, however, the characters avoid speaking openly about certain things because they are living in Communist Romania, where speech and political opinions could be dangerous. That context changed the way I understood the small events in the story. 

Overall, it was a short novel and quite an easy read for me. However, I felt like bringing up so many different characters and even using different names for the same characters became a bit confusing. I am not sure if the author did this on purpose to show how unstable identity becomes in a world shaped by secrecy and suspicion. Instead of feeling like fully fixed individuals, the characters often appear through labels, impressions, or roles, such as innocence or simplicity. This makes them feel harder to pin down, which mirrors the uncertainty that runs throughout the novel.

What really stood out to me was the question about the trenchcoat that appears after the dinner party. At first, it seems like such a small and ordinary thing, just a coat left behind in the apartment. Normally, someone would probably just assume a guest forgot it and move on. But because of the political environment the characters are living in, I think it suddenly feels much more suspicious than it should. Instead of treating it as a simple mistake, they start to wonder if it could mean something more. The narrator even asks whether the coat might be a “trace” of something hidden, which made me think about how easily everyday objects can start to feel threatening in a place where surveillance and informants exist. I also think the fact that it is a trenchcoat might symbolize a spy or investigator, since that is the type of clothing they are stereotypically associated with.

To me, the trenchcoat mostly becomes a symbol of that constant tension and uncertainty. I imagine that when people live in a society where they feel watched or monitored, it probably changes the way they interpret normal situations. A forgotten object might not just be a forgotten object anymore—it might feel like evidence that someone was there secretly observing. I think this is why the characters start questioning everything: who left the coat, whether someone else was present at the dinner, or if someone brought an unexpected guest. What seems like a small mystery slowly turns into something much bigger because of the atmosphere they live in.

At the same time, I also kept thinking about the possibility that the coat might actually mean nothing at all. I think that idea is one of the most interesting parts of the story. It made me think that maybe the characters are projecting their own fears onto something completely ordinary. Because they live in a political system where hidden threats are real, it becomes difficult for them to believe that something could just be accidental or meaningless.

Personally, I think that unresolved ambiguity is what makes the story so interesting. The trenchcoat is never fully explained, and as a reader, I felt the same uncertainty the characters experience. In a way, the trenchcoat stops being important as an object and instead becomes a reflection of the environment the characters live in. It shows how living under authoritarian rule can shape the way people think and react, making them constantly question what might be happening beneath the surface of ordinary life.

To be honest, I did not like If on a winter’s night a traveler. I get why it’s considered creative, but my experience was mostly confusion and distance. In the beginning, when the narrator tells you where to sit, adjust the light, relax, and prepare to read. I remember thinking: why is he telling me what to do and how to feel? But it worked. It pulled me in immediately and made me aware of myself as a reader. For a moment I felt excited, like the book was personally inviting me into it. That is why I would have preferred a physical copy, to focus and settle into one world. On a screen I skim. This novel almost encouraged skimming because the stories kept restarting, and I never stayed in one setting long enough to care about the characters.

After chapter 1, the novel started losing me. The second-person narration confused me. Sometimes “you” are just reading a book, and sometimes “you” are actually living events: going to the bookstore, meeting Ludmilla, chasing manuscripts. I often couldn’t tell if I was inside a story or watching the Reader live his life. Instead of immersion, I felt like I was constantly trying to figure out what level of reality I was in. The plot felt almost plotless because every time one of the stories became interesting, it abruptly stopped and restarted somewhere else.

The one story I actually wanted to keep reading was the one in Malbork. The guy comes back to what he thinks is his hometown after being away for years, but everything feels slightly wrong. His family treats him like a stranger, the house doesn’t feel familiar, and even the girl he always believed was his sister might not actually be related to him. I found interesting the idea that your memories might not even belong to you, and I actually wanted answers. When it suddenly stopped, it felt like the first time the book took away a story I was actually invested in.

The characters did help me understand what the book was trying to do. I actually relate to Lotaria. I don’t naturally read novels for fun very often, I mostly read for school and interpretation. Because of that, I was analyzing it instead of enjoying the story, which I think the book was partly criticizing. 

I don’t approach reading hoping for some huge discovery, sometimes it honestly feels like another academic responsibility. By the end I understood the book’s point: readers search for closure, but reading itself might matter more than endings. I can respect that idea, and the writing is definitely clever, but for me a novel should eventually let me stay somewhere. This one kept moving, and instead of being inside the story, I mostly felt like I was studying it.

Cool ending though

Question: Why does the novel give a clear ending to the Reader and Ludmilla’s relationship but refuses to resolve any of the stories they try to read?