Faces in the Crowd, is the final novel I read for this course and luckily I got to end this semester on a good note. This novel was very interesting to read, to dissect, and to explore. The narrative was fractioned in a rigid fashion which keeps the reader attentive and on their toes in a new way, most novels utilize action or suspense and really crazy scenarios to capture their audiences, but the dizzying array of overlapping memories interweaving with linear events engaged me in a way I didn’t anticipate. Luiselli’s narrator lacks privacy and free time as a mother and finds documenting fragmentation is all she can commit to her storytelling. “Novels need a sustained breath . . . Everything I write is — has to be — in short bursts. I’m short of breath.” The brevity of the text I feel is essential, the narrator is a mother which is a huge sacrifice that is extremely overlooked Mothers are looked down on when they don’t have their life together when they can’t do everything and be everywhere all at once. The rapid way in which the narrator expresses herself leaves the audience room to empathize with a woman whose time, life, and body aren’t her own, her words are frantic like a person working backward to piece things together through this we see a woman writing her way to freedom. Luiselli’s text brings to life her narrator in a way that’s so fascinating, the progression of the narrator is unique to at least anything that I’ve read in that her personal sense of freedom is found in the appropriation of different identities and different lives. Faces in the Crowd is a unique, inward fiction with a multitude of dimensions that develop as Luiselli’s narrator experiences the elation of writing and a project reaching its climax. “When a person has lived alone for a long time,” she says, “the only way to confirm that they still exist is to express activities and things in an easily shared syntax.” In doing a bit of research on Luiselli as a way to help guide my blog this week I visited an essay of hers entitled “Stuttering Cities” Luiselli addresses this idea of language and the catharsis of writing “Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything.” I feel this notion was carried through the novel in the ways we are intended to make of the narrator’s willingness to crystallize her existence. Or through Owen’s attempts to convince others in his life that he’s happy. I feel Luiselli’s text explains that to write is freedom to speak is agency no matter the content her characters realize that the reason they write is not to find a connection with the world in which they can’t seem to belong, but to create a world in which they can. “He asks how much is fiction and how much fact,” the narrator says of her husband, defending her work every morning. His obsession — his perfect, misguided jealousy — misses the point entirely. Fiction isn’t real, of course, but it’s here because someone needed a reality that made sense.
Q: Is it necessary for fictitious narratives to maintain a construct of truth, do narrators necessarily need to be reliable?
I think you are right! This is a novel that demands the readers attention. You have to pay careful attention in order to piece things together. I like how you put that the mother in the novel makes us “empathize with a woman whose time, life, and body aren’t her own.” I think your quote from Luiselli’s essay also sheds light to another topic of the novel which is self-authoring this is seen in how each author writes themselves and the other at the same time. Or, in your words, “the narrator’s willingness to crystallize her existence.”
Thanks for your comment!
– Tesi
I really enjoyed reading your blog post! I love that line! “Fiction isn’t real, of course, but it’s here because someone needed a reality that made sense.” I have never thought of fiction in that way, almost as a necessity to create for some people? To address your question, I think it can be kind of fun when the narrator is considered unreliable, allowing for a misguided journey ending in twists and surprise. I have read books where the narrator is hiding facts and perceptions from the readers, only to uncover these omissions in the end. Sometimes twists are worth it!
Hey, I really like your question. In my opinion I think a novel is good only when the narrator is unreliable because if they are always telling the truth, the story becomes boring and predictable. Honestly a good rule of thumb is to think of every narrator as unreliable. It makes for a more interesting read for sure.