At last, we have arrived at our last book of the semester (summer is near we can do it!) and what a way to end! ‘Faces in the Crowd’ by Valeria Luiselli was an interesting read, it had many layers of story-telling that was only made (semi) clear to me after I had watch the lecture and gotten it explained to me. This was definetly not an easy read! It was confusing and in my mind I compared it to mens 3-in-1 shampoo.

I talked to some people about this book and their interpretation, it seems that there are many interpretations, rightfully so, as I feel this book leaves many loose ends just because of the style its written in. I don’t want to say it doesn’t flow because it does in it’s own way, just not a traditional storytelling way, and I think this leaves out bits and pieces. Anyways the way I initially interoperated it was a women writing a story about her young past (simply put) but I really though about the part where the boy asks what his mothers (our author) book is about to which she responds that its about ghosts.
“It’s a ghost story.
Is it frightening?
No, but it’s a bit sad.
Why? Because the ghosts are dead?
No, they’re not dead.
Then they’re not very ghosty.
No, they’re not ghosts.”
(pg 13-14)
The way I interoperated it was she is writing about people she once knew, their ghost aka the memories she has of those people, the shell of those people, and that maybe she was writing about the ghost of her own past self. I thought about this symbolism of ghost and what it could mean and the first thing I thought of was ghostwriters. A ghostwriter is a person who is hired to write for another person who is credited as an author. This got me thinking a lot about our story, how our narrator goes un-named, and how it seems like the author Gilberto Owen is writing a similar story to our authors life. This then brings up questions of who could be a ghost writer for who? Who is being hidden? Maybe it has something to do with her husband as from my understanding in the lecture he was first written in as a writer as well? There are so many writers and stories within this story that thinking about this long and hard kind of makes my head spin, so I’d love to know what you all think!

Question for you: Who or what do you think she is referring to when she talks of writing about ghosts?