Faces in the Crowd

I’m captivated by Valeria Luiselli’s unique approach to depicting her surroundings, time, and life. Her narrative style transcends the tangible, depicting her experiences in abstract ways where it seems they transcend the limits of reality. I took the * as symbols of travelling in past and current life. One as a mother of the boy and the baby in Mexico city and the other in New York City where she lived off “Reciprocity, not generosity” exemplified by the way they exchanged keys to rooms.

The way she speaks about herself in Mexico as a mother and before (in NY) seems to be important in alluding to her feelings in her life, she seems unstable and regretful in a way of where she stands. I believe especially through her comparisons of how she used to write, we can see at the beginning this sort of “guilt or regret” of being a mother.

Something I noticed and also appreciated was the way “silence” was present, it had life in the story, part of objects and people “as soon as we become accustomed to the silent presence of a thing, it gets broken or disappears” and then follows to describe her relationships with people along the same lines “breaking up or disappearing”. (pg. 3) I find it interesting that she plays so much with blurring the line between objects and people, spaces and time, past and present, real and fiction. It seems like these can bend.

To me, the narrator definitely plays with versions of herself and lives, where we don’t know as readers what her goal is. What I mean is that, whether her other stories are real or not in New York City, or why she’s going back and forth, there is some clear influence and pressure from that version on the one in Mexico city, I mean even the husband is intrigued by what she writes and the implications on her current life. I think some people might focus too much on trying to understand whats fiction and what isn’t, but for me it really felt like there is a purpose behind this going back and forth.

Another thing that stood out for me was the way she played with the idea of ghosts. The story she is writing is about a ghost but isn’t scary, and in her house there are ghosts, and then the husband dreams of this. Moreover, she speaks about the dead and alive a lot, I especially took away her comparison to Quevedo, and her resonance with “living in a conversation with the dead” (10). From this my biggest take away is that her story of NY might’ve been fiction in the nature that it was now a story, and they weren’t with her anymore neither that version of herself. All they were was dead characters who took life when she wrote them or read about them. As a writer, she probably has more “conversations” and “dialogues” with characters than with the people around “I go back to writing the novel whenever I’m not busy with the children. I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it”. I also notice the narrator plays with being able to inhabit or not places, such as the subway station or streets, as these are portrayed differently in the novel, always moving and not really stable – much like her or time or characters…

My question is “Do you think her story/life in New York was real or no? And do you think this decisions changes at all what her goal was?