Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the crowd struck a cord for me as a balancing act, finding time between work, family, and more. It isn’t a book which sits still, instead including so many different voices to create the narrative we follow. The young mother in the present aims to navigate her authorship while parenting, with bursts of effort all she can afford to do rather than consistent and sustained efforts. The past we see another life of her’s, where the setting and plot changes. The narrator lacks the responsibility of family which she has in the present, allowing her the time to focus on her work and socialize too. This is a different narrator, one which is much more free. The writing we see here includes the translation hoax, where she forges some material from a small poet in order to try and get the work published. As she forges it, the poet’s voice begins to shape as the narrator’s, but with a twist. I felt that she took on a new persona in these moments, one separate from her own but also unique from the poet as well, a third voice in a way.
The narrative later begins to blur the line of boundaries between whats happening and whats make believe. I think this is where we start to realize just how much the book plays with spatial orientation and viewpoints, but also just how much the book seems to play with time as well. The detail just seems to flow in the book, with many dates, things, and places being thrown out and about as we read. The perspectives however, change, shift, reconvene, and separate. In the lecture video, we see this as the book is discussed as still unfinished, being rewritten as time goes forward. Time just also seems to be folding, as the timeline starts to forward as seen with the baby saying Pa-Pa.
The woman’s life almost seems to crumble, like a cookie, with her reality starting to converge with that of Owen’s. Pieces collide. Time isn’t linear. Pieces adjoin other trashed and broken chunks. Owen’s viewpoint considers both the dead and the living too which just complicates and opens the story in new directions. The cookie is crumbling and adjoining. The book is written as we read through it with the woman being mourned by the poet who lived years before her, she is simultaneously both the poet and a mother, as well as the previous carefree person. That sentence itself is a doozy and is a sample of what we’re in for when reading the book. Stuff stops making sense in the perspective we understand it as and we’re sort of meant to view it through another lens. Questions for the discussion: If we take on a new perspective by attempting to resemble another viewpoint, doesn’t that just blend two to make three or is it something else completely? Further, by the end of the story, which character is actually in the centre and who is at the side?
“The woman’s life almost seems to crumble, like a cookie, with her reality starting to converge with that of Owen’s. Pieces collide. Time isn’t linear. Pieces adjoin other trashed and broken chunks”.
Interesting. Is our duty as readers to follow the cookie crumble path in order to make sense out of these merged stories.
See you tomorrow!
Julián.
Nice thoughts. I like you how compared the structure of the book on a macro level to her life as a parent/ wife as part of a family, in comparison to her free, cosmopolitan life in the past. And the cookie comparison is apt too. It’s made of many pieces, but they all start interlocking and overlapping in very interesting ways. Maybe that’s why the story has to end in an earthquake. It’s devastating specifically for a subway station underground, but also the physical impact of tectonic plates (worldlines / narratives) colliding with each other.
I do think that it starts off as centering her, but by the end of the book, specifically the earthquake, the narratives are running in parallel, and each character has become their own. Though I also think the book is trying to blend those narratives by obscuring who speaks and leaving some context clues to decipher, to make it all blend together as text.