Faces In the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli is a unique novel that has stories intertwined in three time zones and seems to jump around in its thinking. From the beginning of the story, the story was from the perspective of a writer, who is the mother of two kids. “I have a baby and a boy. They don’t let me breathe. Everything I write is—has to be—in short bursts.” (p.4). From what I’m feeling, she constantly was interrupted by home chores and the children, and these tasks deprived her of the basics of life as a writer. In her writing, she talks about her past in New York, and I believe she misses her past and was sophisticated in her current life. At the same time, she had a dead-end marriage. Every person has troubles in reality, and the narrator expresses her life in writing.
I find it interesting with the “ghosts” mixed in her story, and how she focused on Gilberto Owen. “Yes, I say, it’s a book about Gilberto Owen’s ghost.”（p.57). Owen was a Mexican poet, but there’s a point where I can’t understand whether he’s from the past, now, or the surreal. The narrator claimed she had seen Owen’s face among the many other faces on the subway, but she never saw him. It reminded me of Nadja, both mysterious and spiritually like. They all seem to be a real presence to the narrator, but not to other people The narrator knows everything about him and it seems that she lives in Owen’s mind, how they think, reflect, and view the world parallelly.
By the second half of the novel, it seems like Owen came into narrating the plot, where the narrator and himself take turns to talk. Owen talked about how he takes the subway every day and finds himself losing weight, just as the narrator has noted.
“I was able to see the woman with the dark face and shadows under her eyes.” (p.108) Their narrative is like a closed loop, where Owen can see the narrator as well. That’s one of the things I like about this book, the narrators in this novel are bi-directional, they see each other, blend into the world of each other’s troubles, and their unique voices overlap in perfect harmony, as if becoming each other’s. As Owen is losing weight, he is rubbing himself out, and blending into the narrator and taking voices in the novel.
Other than the parallel narrative Valeria Luiselli had used, I find that the novel also repeatedly mentions death. However, these deaths are abstract and poetic, and for me, they do not necessarily mean the physical cessation of life, but they can be spiritual and emotional death, and resurrection. “Naturally, there are a lot of deaths in the course of a lifetime. Most people don’t notice. They think you die once and that’s it.” (p.61) When we let go of some of our past, hatred, and sadness, is this not a form of death and rebirth?
My question for everyone about this book was since the perspectives and storyline are complex and ambiguous, whose perspective do you think the novel is from, and whose is most accurate and reliable about true facts of their lives?
“the narrators in this novel are bi-directional, they see each other, blend into the world of each other’s troubles, and their unique voices overlap in perfect harmony, as if becoming each other’s.”
Yes, this is a nice way of putting it, and overall you’ve done a good job with what is a difficult novel. (And you make me think that the theme of “death” is really becoming prominent in this course… I didn’t really plan that, but that’s what seems to be happening.)
And yes, the timeline becomes confused and overlapping, but I would point out there there are not just three but also *four* time zones featured… because we also have Owen both as a younger man, in New York, and then looking back (divorced, overweight, unhappy) years later, in Philadelphia. So this is another parallel between him and the woman narrator: both find themselves looking back, somewhat regretfully, somewhat nostalgically, to when they were younger, to their time in New York.
Hi Esther! In my opinion, the true narrator is the mother, who serves as the author of all the three various stories. It appears she is chronicling her experiences across different phases of her life: her younger days in New York, her current life as a mother in Mexico City, and through the lens of Gilberto Owen. Given that she is the author, it’s my understanding that many of the narrations we’ve encountered may not be entirely reliable. This is further suggested when she mentions her husband’s frustration with her for writing about him leaving, an event that hasn’t actually occurred.
I honestly don’t know who the true narrator is. I feel like its almost both of them because of how much they interact with each other. I would almost say they resemble one person together. Great post!
Hi Esther! Nice blog, I particularly enjoyed reading about your interpretation of death in this book. As for your question, I thought that it was two narrators from different time periods, but after watching the lecture, I’m not too sure.
Hi Esther,
I full on thought that the Mother had to be the main narrator in my blog LOL. Guess I was wrong in thinking their were one. Most of the struggles seemed to lean towards the Mother and that’s probably why I thought so. The book does have some unreliability which is annoying (to me at least).
Hi! To answer your question I originally thought the Mother was the true narrator of the novel as a lot of the experiences and struggles seemed to be from her life but after watching the lecture and reading other blog posts I’m not sure in the slightest as it seems to be a blend of narrators.