{"id":36,"date":"2024-04-02T23:12:47","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T06:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/?p=36"},"modified":"2024-04-02T23:12:47","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T06:12:47","slug":"luiselli-faces-in-the-crowd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/2024\/04\/02\/luiselli-faces-in-the-crowd\/","title":{"rendered":"Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd"},"content":{"rendered":"

Faces in the Crowd,\u00a0<\/em>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. \u201cNovels need a sustained breath . . . Everything I write is \u2014 has to be \u2014 in short bursts. I\u2019m short of breath.\u201d 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<\/em>\u00a0is 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. \u00a0\u201cWhen a person has lived alone for a long time,\u201d she says, \u201cthe only way to confirm that they still exist is to express activities and things in an easily shared syntax.\u201d \u00a0In 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\u00a0make of the narrator\u2019s willingness to crystallize her existence. Or through Owen\u2019s attempts to convince others in his life that he\u2019s happy. \u00a0I 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\u2019t seem to belong, but to create a world in which they can. \u201cHe asks how much is fiction and how much fact,\u201d the narrator says of her husband, defending her work every morning. His obsession \u2014 his perfect, misguided jealousy \u2014 misses the point entirely. Fiction isn\u2019t real, of course, but it\u2019s here because someone needed a reality that made sense.<\/p>\n

Q: Is it necessary for fictitious narratives to maintain a construct of truth, do narrators necessarily need to be reliable?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Faces in the Crowd,\u00a0is 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100366,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[42,44,41,43],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faces-in-the-crowd","tag-end-of-semester","tag-faces-in-the-crowd","tag-last-book","tag-luiselli"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100366"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/37"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/rhiannonrmst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}