Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

Faces in the Crowd Reviews

• 
  s.penkevich

  If you dedicate your life to writing novels, you’re dedicating yourself to folding time.
  
  Literature has a seemingly magical ability to fill the cracks of reality with fiction, creating a monument to the human condition. Valeria Luiselli’s impressive first novel, Faces in the Crowd in the English translation or Los Ingrávidos (‘The Weightless’) in the original Spanish, is a sagacious statement to the powers of literature, openly examining the mechanics of writing as if in an exhibition of regality. Adorned in the spirit of classic Latin American literature such as the trailblazing
  Pedro Páramo, Faces strikes a fresh pose for a new century and is surely to become canonized into the great literary tradition from which it springs. She has created a cast of characters from reality, like
  Federico García Lorca, and the imaginary and set them walking about the streets of New York and Philadelphia; these characters are ghosts of an age now gone that still speak as loudly and poignantly today. ‘A horizontal novel, told vertically,’ Luiselli explores the poetic gap between author and character, plunging oneself further into the realm of words and building layer upon layer of sensationally surreal mingling between the creator and the created until the defining boundaries become practically nonexistent and irrelevant.
  
  ‘the tabula rasa of the pages and plans, the anonymity the multiple voices of the writing offer me’
  
  Luiselli offers all the glorious metaphysical and metafictional platforms of literature in her multi-layered story. A woman who never leaves home writes a novel about a younger character-version of herself as a poetry translator determined to bring her obsession with under-known poet
  Gilbreto Owen into print for the masses.

  I know I need a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn. Open doors, windows. Raise walls and demolish them.

  Luiselli probes the gaps between author and author-character, creating a writer and her written self that both are and are not the same voice. She punches holes in the paper-thing walls of reality to plaster them up with fiction much like Elizabeth Hardwick does in
  Sleepless Nights, except building multiple layers as author-characters create their further author-characters. She teases the assumption of a reader that the author would share similar experiences and ideals as their character, with the woman always having to remind her husband that what she is creating is actually fiction. Or is it? ‘My husband reads some of this and asks who Moby is. Nobody I say. Moby is a character…But Moby exists. Or perhaps not.’
  
  Troubled by the gripes from her husband being unable to separate biography from fiction when he reads her manuscript, she decides to bury herself further into fiction and begins to write a novel about Owen, creating ‘a novel that has to be told from the outside in order to be read from within.’ As Owen’s story takes shape, the woman becomes less and less of a presence while Owen himself ages and thins towards physical oblivion.

  In
  One Thousand and One Nights the narrator strings together a series of tales to put off the day of her death. Perhaps a similar but reverse mechanism would work for this story, this death. The narrator discovers that while she is stringing the tale, the mesh of her immediate reality wears thin and breaks. The fiber of fiction begins to modify reality and not vice versa as it should be. Neither of the two can be sacrificed. The only way to save all the planes of the story is to close one curtain and open another...change the characters’ names, remember that everything is or should be fiction. Write what really did happen and what did not.

  Owen’s story is representative of the woman’s existence, or is it that the woman is representative of Owen’s? Pushing the metafiction into incredible realms of abstraction, Owen decides to write a story about the woman he sees reading his book of poetry, Obras on the subway, the book the woman is reading during the period where she keeps thinking she sees flashes of Owen’s face in the subway. The two become like ghosts haunting one another.
  
  A wonderful aspect of Faces is Luiselli’s nods to the works that inspired and function within the novel at hand. The characters visions of one another in the subway across time ('you can remember the future too') recalls a poem by
  Ezra Pound written when he thought he saw a fallen friend in the subway: ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd / petals on a wet, black bough.’. Pound is an inspiration to the characters within the novel, and Owen wonders if he has seen him too on the subway. Early on in the book the author-character recalls a passage from Saul Bellow where he states ‘the living look from the center outward, the dead from some periphery to some sort of center.’ Luiselli hints towards the mechanics of her own novel that features two characters dissolving towards a ghost-like state while looking ‘inward’ through their fiction towards one another. Metafictional examinations of the novel bloom all across the garden of her prose, ideas working both as the outward expression of ideas and also the roots that give the novel life. For example, the staccato structure of the short paragraphs skipping through time being both a reflection of the woman having to write in quick doses under the necessity of constant attention to her children and the author-character writing a novel solely from the post-its on which she took brief notes of Owen’s life.
  
  ‘All novels lack something or someone. In this novel there’s no one. No one except a ghost I used to see sometimes in the subway.’
  
  While the English translation of the novel bears an apt title for the book considering all the subway visions found within, I tend to prefer the title in it’s original— ‘The Weightless’; this is a novel about losing oneself in the efforts of creating fiction, about giving way to the heavy weightlessness of words, to become the author-character instead of simply ‘the author’. Ghosts play a large role in the novel, and the ‘ghost’ of each character haunts the other layers of the novel much like how the reality of an author haunts the pages of the characters they create. ‘You are not an utterance,’ Owen is reminded by a wise friend when he questions his state as a verb tense, desiring to be the immortality of words instead of the failing flesh.

  Perhaps it’s right that words contain nothing, or almost nothing. That their content is, at the very least, variable.

  The characters are drawn towards the realm of words, of putting their souls into fiction and poetry, and we watch them withdraw from the pages as they do so. The allusion to
  Pedro Páramo opens the gates of interpretation to Luiselli’s literary vision of ‘ghosts’ that these characters seem to become, but, thankfully, she leaves much open to such interpretation. This is a novel that leaves threads hanging to tie to theory, a novel built of ideas and not concrete facts, the sort of literature that opens itself to discussion and advancement instead of a tidy closed casket.

  There are people who are capable of recounting their lives as a sequence of events that lead to a destiny. If you give them a pen, they write you a horribly boring novel in which each line is there for a reason…

  This is a novel about the possibilities of literature, the pathway from past to present, building on the headway of literary tradition and pressing it boldly forward to unknown futures. Luiselli does not tie up loose ends out of laziness or incompetence, but out of respect to the reader and respect to the futures of fiction.
  
  Valeria Luiselli is a name to watch for. Published when the author was a mere 28 years old in 2011, and brought to an english translation only three years later published by Coffee House Press alongside her collection of essays,
  Sidewalks, Luiselli delivers an early promise of literary greatness. Spanning a century and peopled with new and familiar faces, this novel is something special and deserving of the following that has been slowly building. Faces in the Crowd explores the metafictional worlds of literature and the poetic gaps between author and character and presents them in a fresh and fascinating manner. This is a novel of ghosts echoing the lessons of days past to those in the present present and the voice of Luiselli is one I hope to have haunting us all for years to come.
  5/5
  
  'By now it's an elaborate lie, repeated to myself so often that it's come to form part of my repertory of events, indistinguishable from any other memory.'
  
  
• 
  Dolors

  How many lives and deaths can coexist in a single existence?
  Surely more than one.
  Are we mere characters in the stories of our lives?
  Luiselli goes one step farther and suggests we are ghostly entities that ramble along the hazy line between present and past, hallucination and memory, art and decay.
  The two fragmented voices of this weightless story reminded me of
  Requiem: A Hallucination but instead of Tabucchi evoking the ghost of Pessoa in his beloved Lisbon, we encounter Luiselli seeing the apparition of the Harlem Renaissance poet Gilberto Owen in the stations of the New York subway.
  
  This is a novel of extremes.
  There is a young woman with a lyrical heart who understands life through poetry, all wasted potential as she later becomes a failed writer, an accidental mother and the prisoner of a tedious marriage.
  There is a poet who beams through the light of his verses who ends up working as a clerk in the consulate while he is going blind, waiting for the definite death that will put an end to the agony of seeing himself slowly dissipate into nothingness.
  Time is what separates the two narrators, time that folds onto itself and allows the possibility of living in future memories that were created in the past.
  
  This is a perfeclty executed novel.
  The prose is fresh, cinematic and full of music, imploded with fervent meditations on the act of writing and the way it gives reason to be to creative minds.
  Luiselli’s constant change of frame becomes a rhythmical constant and the dialogues between the two characters become more and more immediate until their timelines and spaces converge into an extravagant but climatic conclusion, which invites the reader to multiple readings that can change the whole significance of the story.
  
  This is a novel that can seem snobbish.
  The artsy panorama of the Harlem Reinassance is gratuitously referenced in the two storylines; William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Melville, Hemingway, Federico García Lorca are only a few of the names that appear repeatedly without adding value to the story. Most readers will bask in certain allusions, but is it necessary to limit the joy of this book to a certain kind of reader? I prefer novels that tantalize indirectly, calling out to connections that the reader has to work for himself.
  Nevertheless, the few scenes where children interact with their parents are golden for their brevity, charged with meaning, for where is imagination and cretivity more fierce and pure than in children’s minds? Should we educate castrating that imagination or giving them wings to fly?
  
  An impossible meeting of two people who love each other without having ever met is what will remain with me. The idea that everything is possible, even if it’s only in our imagination. Tragedy included.
• 
  Agnieszka

  
  This novel has a structure like these matryoshka dolls, it’s a story within a story and then again another story and lines between them are quite indistinct. Luiselli writes with short paragraphs, mixes time plans, shifts from one city to another, changes perspective and narrators and trying to capture the transience of the moment spins chaotic, yet poetic and dreamlike tale populated with recognizable characters and nameless figures as well.
  
  A dense, porous novel. Like a baby's heart .
  
  In the twenties of last century an inconspicuous poet Gilberto Owen lived in Harlem near Morningside Park, Federico Garcia Lorca living in neighborhood was writing his poem Poet in New York and Duke Ellington was performing recitals in the club some streets down there. Maybe they even met each other then. Here Ezra Pound saw ghost of his friend on metro station and would come there every day to write and refine his poem till only two poignant lines survived, comparing faces in the crowd to petals on a dark bough. And here then young woman in Mexico City obsessed with Gilberto Owen is writing her novel and recalls time when she had lived in New York and chasing Owen's steps would gain materials to her work on him. Stories fluidly overlap creating muddled and nonlinear narration, multilayered construction, a vertical novel told horizontally or may it was a horizontal novel, told vertically . Anyway, vertigo.
  
  The novel is full of ghosts, people real and imaginary. Faces in the crowd, in metro, on the streets. Anonymous. People faceless and weightless. I like Polish title that could be translated just the weightless . Maybe we all are ghosts after all and someone else’s projection. Maybe I only imagine that I sit in the metro reading Faces in the crowd while actually it is one obscure poet that writes his own novel and claims he saw a woman in the metro with the book in her hands. It could be, why not ? And what does it matter that divides us whole century and thousands miles.
  
  the difference between being alive and being dead is just a matter of viewpoint: the living look from the center outward, the dead from the periphery to some sort of center .
  
  
• 
  Henk

  Insincerity, in terms of forging manuscripts of dead poets but especially in respect to marriage, seems the main theme of this book. Or maybe fiction is the theme of the book. Either way, I lacked connection to the main characters, who didn’t feel real in any kind of manner to me.
  I led an imbecilic life and liked it
  
  
  Faces in the Crowd gets harder and harder to follow the further one gets, with unsympathetic characters drifting in a kind of non-world. I found the main character rather uninteresting: despite her kids and working for academic presses she feels rather teenager-like obsessed with sex with everyone but her husband. Drugs also plays a major role.
  The book follows her till around 50 pages in, when we move to the novel she is writing on a poet. He seems rather a dadaist and says things like: The syntax of aspirational unhappiness
  
  Who imagines who, starts to become more and more a theme and the pacing of both stories begins to align further into the book. Still I found the links between both stories not strong enough. Just mentioning Philadelphia, Columbia University and a certain plant pot just doesn't cut it to glue the book halves together in a way that lifts the whole up.
  In a way I was reminded of
  Asymmetry of
  Lisa Halliday, also a book I expected to enjoy but didn't deliver on the promise of its cleverness.
  
  A horizontal vertical novel
  Valeria Luiselli often writes, and I think I understand the ambition of the novel, revolving around remembering the future, but the novel just didn't convince me.
  Did I get the feeling the two main characters poets and translators, central to the story, are really practicing their profession? The Latin American poet constantly talks about Yankees, says a few time he is blind, has some random sex, mentions the 20s stock market crash (with the whole jumping of people in the Wall Street crash being largely apocryphal) but for the rest he doesn’t feel like a real person.
  
  In the end I was disappointed and slightly confused, but I will give the author another try, given the ambition she shows in this early novel.
• 
  Heba

  قطعة أدبية فريدة...فاتنة واستثنائية بدون شك....
  السرد يتمرد على ما هو تقليدي ليأتيك متقطعاً على دفعات قصيرة وسريعة...، عمل يُقرأ من أي مقطع ولن ينقطع الخيط السردي ولا يشكل تهديداً للبناء الروائي..
  كما لو أن الكاتبة داهمها فراغ مباغت عليها أن تقيم الجدران ، تفتح النوافذ ، لتكن الأبواب مواربة...ولن تُبالي بالأثاث ولا بزخرفة الكلمات...هنالك زوايا فارغة بانتظار الامتلاء...
  عليك ألا تأمل باتساق الهيكل ولكنه لن يُخلِف انطباعاً لديك بالفوضوية...
  هل عليها بتأثيث الأرواح...لا بل أطياف أشباح ..
  امرأة مكسيكية تروي لنا ماضيها حيث كانت شابة تعمل في مدينة "نيويورك" مترجمة لأعمال شاعر مكسيكي يُدعى "جيلبرتو أوين" ولقد كان شخصية هامشية مغمورة من أوائل القرن العشرين...
  لقد كان يحدق في وجوه العابرين بمحطة مترو الأنفاق في "مانهاتن" ومن بين الوجوه امرأة سمراء لها ظلال داكنة تحت عينيها ...لطالما التقيا عندما يتوقف قطارين متوازيين في احدى المحطات وعندئذٍ تنعكس صورة كل منهما على نافذة الأخر ...
  ولكن تلك المرأة هى ذاتها من تروي لنا ماضيها وقد التقته هى الأخرى في الموقف ذاته..؟!!
  هى تستحضر شبح الشاعر من الماضي...وهو يتنبأ بطيفها من المستقبل...يتداخل العالم الواقعي والتخييلي لتقف أنت عاجزاً عن معرفة الحقيقة...
  بالنهاية ..تراءى لي بأنه من المحتمل بينما تتسارع الخطى..يتوارى أصحابها وراء المعاطف المثقلة بالأيادي المندسة بجيوبها ، ملامح الوجوه ذات النظرات التائهة مختبئة في ثنايا الأوشحة ..تلهث الأنفاس ويُشبع الهواء بالزفرات وبالتنهيدات المكتومة والهمهمات المتداخلة..
  هناك بين كل الوجوه في الزحام قد تلتقي بأحدهم وإن كان طيفاً ولكنه يلاحقك...وفي اللحظة التي يكتب فيها قصتك وهى تنبض بين أصابعه....ترويها أنت...
  "" مكثفة مسامية مثل قلب وليد""....
• 
  Seemita

  Like Valeria, I stare at the faces in the crowd; the crowd of short paragraphs hurrying across the surface of this book, intermingling with the innate desire to escape the mound without any considerable collision.
  
  Like each paragraph, I anoint a barren, precise tone; a tone synthesizing topical fervor and ornate truants, rendering authenticity to a near magical premise.
  
  Like the topical fervor, I vacillate between two worlds; the fact that I am fictionalizing and the fiction that I am factualizing.
  
  Like the fact-fiction saga, I appreciate the person and the reflection; akin to the writer protagonist conjuring a fake poet to secure success, if only at a sedate cost, without keeping the poet’s own whim under chains.
  
  Like the poet’s whim, I breathe across a layer; a layer dividing the two worlds, consisting of acute observation, dissolving identities, moribund spirit and uninvited realizations.
  
  Like the two worlds, I immerse in syntactical mess; the life of the protagonist and her derived muse that by intent, should have merged into a delightful soft mousse, actually emerging as a marginally hard, gooey concoction.
  
  Like the concoction, I expand to add mass; the substantial mass of innovative plotline and formidable modern-day literature references that is rapidly bulking the novel’s consistency against a mildly incongruous story-telling.
  
  Like the story-telling, I disintegrate to trough again; troughs that outnumbered crests, turning the whole reading expedition like a tarmac witnessing more departures than arrivals.
  
  Like the few arrivals, I keep flashing on board; the board which bears Valeria’s name too, and against which, there flickers a few reading flights that I wish will arrive for me one day.
• 
  Algernon (Darth Anyan)

  
  After a month of work, removing everything extraneous, only two poignant lines survived, comparing faces in the crowd to petals on a dark bough.
  
  
  
  It's called poetry, this act of boiling down the soup of words until only the essence, the perfume, the ineffable remains. Names, plot twists, locations, historical dates becomes not irrelevant, but universal: light and darkness, inside and outside, life and death. It is so easy to write a thousand pages of picaresque adventures, with the reader strapped in and just following the rollercoaster tracks, but it takes a lot of work and a lot of bleeding inside to capture a life in only a couple of lines. Valeria Luiselli is a true poet of the urban jungle, a mapmaker of the undercurrents and of the shifting winds of the modern life's alienation from his environment. With her debut novel she jumps directly to the top of my list of postmodernist troubadours.
  
  The boy sings to the baby while we bathe her: Autumn leaves are falling down, falling down, falling down. Autumn leaves are falling down and Mama's crying.
  
  
  
  The way the novel is written, it contains its own review and commentary. A writer in a Mexican town writes about a translator in New York who writes about her own work adapting to the English language the verses of an obscure Mexican poet. The borders between the three stories and the three timelines are blurred, porous, interchangeable. Such exercises in style are apt to be called gimmicky, and need a deft hand at the steering wheel to bring them safely to shore. Luiselli knows what she's doing, and is even willing to share her technique with the reader:
  
  I know I have to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn. Open doors, windows. Raise walls and demolish them.
  
  
  
  This direct participation of the reader in the creative act reminds me of the works of Italo Calvino. Like him, Luiselli invites the reader to take an active role in the story, to inhabit the empty spaces and to bring his own experiences and memories into the structure of the story. I live in a big, industrial city myself, and I had more than once travelled on the subway or on the commuter bus, looking at the faces around me, each carefully closed in on itself, a ghost in the machine that will pass out of my life as quickly as it flickered in.
  
  The woman appeared to me most often in those moments when two trains on parallel tracks are traveling at almost the same speed for a few instants and you can see the other people go past as if you were watching the frames of a celluloid reel.
  
  Imagination joins hands with memory to re-create the background stories of these ghosts, to find the motives they are still haunting the present time, to see ourselves through their eyes. The writer takes us through the looking glass - an invitation to change the perspective, the frame of reference - an exercise of considering life from the point of view of the departed. Death is both real and metaphorical, and telling the difference between the two is one way to explain what the book is all about. Writing becomes an act of redemption, of recovery, of coming back in from the world of ghosts to the realm of the living.
  
  When a person has lived alone for a long time, the only way to confirm that they still exist is to express activities and things in an easily shared syntax: this face, these bones that walk, this mouth, this hand that writes.
  
  
  
  Actual death is preceded by a long series of little deaths, loss and oblivion, and each of the three narrators guides us through his or her own succession of departures, disappearances. The poet is missing his children, taken by a bitter wife to a different city after their divorce. The translator is going through a series of casual amorous exchanges, in search of the one lasting commitment. The writer is in a disfunctional relationship with a husband who may be cheating on her. We learn about them in short movie frames, sometimes only a paragraph long, sometimes simple post-it notes, weeks and moths of living distilled down to one significant image.
  
  I knew it wasn't a good idea to place the least trust in household objects; as soon as we become accustomed to the silent presence of a thing, it gets broken or disappears. My ties to the people around me were also marked by those two modes of impermanence: breaking up or disappearing.
  
  The ghosts that are looking at us from the outside in are our own past presences, our moments of revelation or of decision making, branchings of the path we have taken through life. We still walk on the beaten track, but these ghosts are wandering in the 'might have been' territory.
  
  what happens is that people die many times in a single life. People die, irresponsibly leave a ghost of themselves hanging around, and then they, the original and the ghost, go on living, each in his own rights.
  
  
  
  The process is unavoidable, but not necessarily a step in the wrong direction. Luiselli postulates that dying is the only way to learn how to live, that taking a step outside of our self-absorbtion and looking at the faces in the trains that are passing us by is how we understand and accept the passage of time and the impermanence of relationships.
  
  Leave a life. Blow everything up. No, not everything; blow up the square meter you occupy among people. Or better still: leave empty the chair at the tables you once shared with friends, not metaphorically, but really, leave a chair, become a gap for your friends, allow the circle of silence around you to swell and fill with speculation. What few people understand is that you leave one life to start another.
  
  Death seen as a beginning and not an end; ghosts as a continuation of life on another plane, parallel to our reality; time as a passing train, capable of going faster or slower, even of stopping and reversing in its tracks: the thematic backbone of the novel is clear now to my mind, but in trying to look at the building bricks I have the feeling that I am missing on the essence, on that ineffable charm and elegance that characterizes these often prozaic and brief details of an ordinary life, of an anonymous face lost among the multitude of similar faces that are passing me by every day.
  
  If you dedicate your life to writing novels, you're dedicating yourself to folding time.
  I think it's more a matter of freezing time without stopping the movement of things, a bit like when you're on a train, looking out of the window.
  
  and, The subway, its multiple stops, its break-downs, its sudden accelerations, its dark zones, could function as the space-time scheme for this other novel.
  
  
  
  I called the book in my introduction 'urban poetry' and my response to it was an emotional one first, and an analytical one only now, as I try to organize my thoughts and by bookmarks into an easier reference frame. Most important, I get the feeling that every reader will focus on something different from me, will experience a resonance and a recognition in another part of the text or in a different fragmented image.
  
  Tiny shards of glass went flying, something like fragments of a child's world: that chair, that man, that poet, that sad, that broken; that sad, broken poet man.
  
  There are anchor points in the story, border markers that appeal to our common cultural baggage. Instead of name dropping, they serve as pointers in the right direction on the map. Some of these names are real, some imaginary, most of them are urban poets, explorers of the inner worlds of the soul in their turn: Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Federico Garcia Lorca, Gilberto Owen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Zvorsky. Walker Evans is not mentioned here, but I took the liberty of adding his images to my review, as one artist who I am sure was sensible to the attraction and the poetry of strangers faces met only for an instant on their way to somewhere else.
  
  what am I left with after the last page? Recognition of a kindred spirit and more than a little envy at the talent this new author displays ( I fell in love with her the way a stone might become enamoured of a bird.), at the ease with which she plays on emotions and brings highbrow concepts to bear on her minimalist sketches. Loneliness shared and pain alleviated by beauty to be found in the most surprising places.
  
  If I believed in turning points, which I don't, I'd say that I began that night to live as if inhabited by another possible life that wasn't mine, but one which, simply by the use of imagination, I could give myself up to completely. I started to look inward from the outside, from someplace to nowhere.
  
  
  
  I look forward to reading more stories from this gifted author.
  
  Easter Egg: there's a short essay at the end of my ebook edition of the novel, called "Manifesto a Velo", a song of praise for riding a bycicle in the city, something that resonated strogly and positively with my own interest in this particular pastime. I know that I am a radical and impractical, but I would love to live in a city without cars, were everybody rides a bycicle, and public transport is electricy driven.
  
  copyright: all images by Walker Evans, from his Subway series
• 
  Julie Ehlers

  In the kitchen, Dakota's ex-boyfriend asked why I was just up and leaving like that. I told him that I'd turned into a ghost; or maybe that I was the only living girl in a city of ghosts; that, in any case, I didn't like dying all the time.
  
  I don't feel equal to talking about this book; in fact, I should probably just direct everyone to
  this review and be done with it, but given how much ink I spill on books I dislike, I really want to be able to say a few words on a book I'm giving 5 stars. Faces in the Crowd is a short but dense novel that mashes up three genres: a wholly contemporary smart-young-alienated-woman-in the big-city story; a familiar drama of marital discontent; and a kind of hyperrealism or magical realism that seems to be characteristic of some Mexican literature—but given how embarrassingly little Mexican literature I've read so far, I can't say that for sure. What I can say is that this novel, which explores poetry and literature, the intersection of lives and deaths across time, the unreliability of translation, the alienation of urban living and the immigrant experience, and the weird relationships humans have with one another, among other things, completely captivated me. I loved it and it continues to loom large in my imagination. I can also see how a reader might hate it. Valeria Luiselli has an audacious, ambitious intellect, and if you like that in your novelists this is worth a try.
• 
  julieta

  Una novela contada en fragmentos, tanto que para mí se queda todo como en chiquito. Tiene momentos muy lindos, pero me parece un poco rebuscada la estructura y cosas que cuenta, no llega a fluir, está muy ocupada siendo ingeniosa todo el tiempo.
  
  Me queda la sensación de que se mantiene alejada de todo lo que cuenta, le falta vida, o mugre, o algo.
  Es como muy novela de escritora que sabe mucho, pero no se siente natural, me cuesta creerle.
  La cito a ella, porque dice algo que me parece que describe lo que me hizo sentir este libro:
  
  "Había algo de impostado en esa vida, en la excesiva estetización de esa realidad, diseñada como para ser contemplada por espectadores a través de una lente".
  
  Me gustaría leer algo más suyo, no sé si esta no era la mejor manera de empezar, pero este libro me desesperó, no hay manera de conectar con nada de lo que pasa, se siente todo como un truco, muy bien armado y estructurado, pero que le falta corazón.
• 
  Javier (off for a while)

  
  

  Y entonces estoy tentada de decirle que todos somos fantasmas, que todos hemos entrado demasiado pronto en las películas de los fantasmas, pero este hombre es bueno y no quiero hacerle daño y por lo tanto me quedo callada. Además, quién me asegura a mí que él no lo sabe.
  —Roberto Bolaño. Joanna Silvestri

  
  
  La vida en el extranjero tiene algo de irreal. Por mucho que te adaptes nunca acabas de pertenecer del todo a ese nuevo país donde ni el idioma, ni las costumbres, ni el paisaje ni el clima son los tuyos. Esa constante sensación de extrañeza, de estar desubicado, hace que no puedas hacer nada con el piloto automático puesto; actúas de un modo más consciente y todo tiene más intensidad. Por otra parte, es inevitable que todo resulte vagamente ajeno e indiferente, como visto desde fuera. Hay quien lo lleva mal, pero a mí me gusta la sensación de libertad que te da el poder moverte entre dos mundos, como un fantasma a medio camino entre el más allá y el aquí, observando divertido el quehacer de los vivos.
  Pero al final siempre aparece ese incontrolable deseo de regresar, porque “el viajero que huye,” cantaba Gardel, “tarde o temprano detiene su andar.” Y entonces las cosas se complican porque no se puede regresar al sitio que se abandonó; el tiempo ha pasado y todo es diferente. En lugar de pertenecer un poco a dos mundos, ahora te das cuentas de que no encajas en ninguno de ellos. Como Juan Preciado al regresar a Comala, te has convertido en un fantasma en un mundo de fantasmas.
  
  La narradora de Los ingrávidos también ha detenido su andar por el mundo y, después de vivir en Nueva York por un tiempo, ha regresado a su Comala particular, situado en su Ciudad de México natal.
  Allí, atrapada en un matrimonio y en una enorme casona que se desmoronan inexorablemente ante sus ojos, trata de escribir una novela sobre su experiencia neoyorquina. O quizá no se trate de una novela sino simplemente de un espacio propio donde refugiarse de una realidad —que, aunque ella parece no darse cuenta, no tiene nada de real— que la asfixia.
  En Nueva York, en cambio, se entregaba a la vida con el desapego del que está de paso, con la sensualidad de quien habita un cuerpo prestado, con la audacia del que vive fuera del tiempo. Como un fantasma. La novela que está escribiendo ahora describe esa experiencia, su variopinto grupo de amistades —artistas urbanos y hípsters que aparecían en su apartamento sin avisar y desaparecían antes de que uno pudiera estar seguro de si ellos también eran fantasmas a su manera— y su trabajo como lectora y traductora en una minúscula editorial especializada en autores latinoamericanos cuyo editor jefe (y único) le había encargado que encontrase al próximo
  Bolaño.
  

  Pues lástima. ¿Ya oíste, Minni?, tenemos el honor de trabajar con la única latinoamericana que no fue amiga de Bolaño.
  ¿Quién es ése, chief?, preguntó Minni, que nunca se enteraba de nada.
  Es el escritor chileno muerto con más amigos vivos.

  
  
  Buscando una joya oculta de la literatura latinoamericana que pudiera convertirse en la próxima sensación editorial, la narradora encontró los escritos de
  Gilberto Owen, un poeta mexicano prácticamente desconocido que fue una figura marginal del Renacimiento del Harlem de los años 20. Su interés por Owen era puramente profesional al principio, pero pronto sus vidas comenzaron a reflejarse la una en la otra.
  La narradora comenzó a obsesionarse entonces no solo con la obra de Owen sino con su vida en Nueva York, donde hubieran sido casi vecinos si no fuera porque les separaban unas cuantas décadas. Rastreando las huellas del poeta por las calles y bibliotecas del barrio, empezó a cruzarse con su fantasma en el metro. Ahora, mientras escribe en su extraña casa en México, la narración sobre sus años neoyorquinos comienza a convertirse en una recreación de los de Owen. Poco a poco, la voz del poeta comienza a superponerse a la de la novelista hasta que es difícil saber quién escribe sobre quién.
  Owen también viajaba en el metro y también se cruzaba con sus propios fantasmas —con la “mujer de la mirada triste” en la ventanilla del vagón que discurría por la vía paralela. El suburbano, como el infierno de
  Dante, parece ser el lugar ideal para tropezarse con aparecidos, como ya le ocurriera a
  Ezra Pound, quien se encontró en una estación del metro de París cara a cara con su amigo muerto y compuso los famosos versos de
  In the Station of the Metro que dan título a la traducción inglesa de la novela de Luiselli.
  

  Me dijo que en esa misma estación el poeta Ezra Pound había visto un día a su amigo Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, muerto unos meses atrás en una trinchera en Neuville-Saint-Vaast. Pound estaba apoyado contra una columna del andén, esperando, cuando por fin se aproximó el tren. Al abrirse las puertas del vagón vio aparecer entre la gente el rostro de su amigo. En unos segundos, el vagón se llenó de otros rostros, y el de Brzeska quedó sepultado por la multitud. Pound permaneció inmóvil algunos instantes, sobrecogido, hasta que cedieron primero las rodillas y después todo el cuerpo. Apoyando todo su peso sobre la columna, deslizó la espalda hasta sentir la caricia concreta del piso en el filo de las nalgas. Sacó una libreta y empezó a tomar notas. Esa misma noche, en un diner al sur de la ciudad, terminó un poema de más de trecientos versos. Al día siguiente lo releyó y le pareció demasiado largo. Volvió todos los días a la misma estación, a la misma columna, para podar, cortar, mutilar el poema. Debía ser igual de breve que la aparición de su amigo muerto, igual de estremecedor. Desaparecer todo para hacer aparecer un solo rostro. Después de un mes de trabajo, sobrevivieron dos versos:
  
  

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
  Petals on a wet, black bough.

  
  
  Hay muchas historias circulando por vías paralelas en Los ingrávidos. Del mismo modo que la narradora recuerda sus “días de gloria” en Nueva York, un Owen viejo, gordo y casi ciego que en lugar de regresar a su Sinaola natal prefirió convertirse en fantasma en tierra ajena y acabar sus días en Filadelfia, rememora sus años neoyorquinos; su participación, casi a regañadientes, en el Renacimiento del Harlem y su probablemente ficticia amistad con otros intelectuales como
  Louis Zukofsky,
  Nella Larsen y, muy especialmente,
  Federico García Lorca.
  Owen no se tomaba muy en serio a Lorca, un españolet afeminado y juerguista, un niño bien que no hablaba inglés y que parecía más interesado en ir a fiestas y burlarse de los gringos con sus absurdas performances que en escribir poesía… hasta que un día, sin darle mayor importancia, Lorca les lee a Owen y a Zukofsky unos versos algo fantasmagóricos en los que está trabajando, algo sobre un vals y sobre guirnaldas de llanto y lirios de nieve… los versos que Owen habría querido escribir él mismo.
  
  Del mismo modo que Juan Preciado regresa a Comala en busca de su padre, un buen número de autores latinoamericanos de las últimas décadas retornan de tanto en cuando a
  Pedro Páramo en busca de, si no sus orígenes, al menos una seña común de identidad. Al menos en la obra de Luisellli la presencia de
  Rulfo es innegable: tanto en Los ingrávidos como después en
  Desierto sonoro el fantasma de Pedro Páramo se puede sentir en cada página, como si de habitaciones de una casa encantada se tratasen.
  La historia de la joven editora mexicana que abandona New York para volver a su fantasmagórico lugar de origen guarda un evidente paralelismo con Pedro Páramo; la casona parece un modelo reducido de Comala y el marido, los hijos y los vecinos comparten una cierta cualidad incorpórea con el clásico aparecido. Pero no es un guiño literario ni un eco posmodernista. Luiselli no se contenta con adornar sus novelas con unas pocas referencias a la que probablemente sea la obra cumbre de la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX; la autora toma Pedro Páramo como punto de partida y lo actualiza y expande, añadiendo nuevas capas y matices —¡como si la novela de Rulfo tuviera pocos!
  No solo Owen y la narradora, otros personajes viven prácticamente enterrados en vida, se sienten fuera de la realidad o ven apariciones; hay fantasmas que no saben que lo son y vivos que eligen serlo. El regreso es un motivo recurrente y los saltos temporales son frecuentes. Luiselli no solo crea muchos Comalas diferentes y superpuestos, también nos hace ver que no hace falta morir para estar rodeado de fantasmas.
  Y puestos a poner en tela de juicio nuestra concepción de la realidad, si podemos morir y seguir viviendo como fantasmas en un mundo que no es ni más allá ni tan acá, ¿por qué morir una sola vez? ¿Qué sucedería si, a lo largo de nuestra existencia, muriéramos muchas veces, sin apenas darnos cuenta? Cada una de esas muertes podría “liberar” un fantasma que habitaría una realidad más o menos paralela, que circularía por la misma línea de metro, aunque por la vía de al lado. ¿Seríamos nosotros menos reales a medida que acumulamos muertes y sembramos fantasmas?
  
  “¡Ten cuidado! Si juegas al fantasma, en uno te conviertes,” advierte la cita de la Cábala con la que se abre la novela; una advertencia probablemente dirigida al lector, porque para los personajes llega un poco tarde.
  En cierto sentido, durante su juventud, tanto Owen como la narradora jugaron de una manera más o menos intencionada a vivir como fantasmas. La única diferencia es que Owen era consciente de estar convirtiéndose gradualmente en un espíritu. Cada día, antes de entrar en la estación de metro, se subía a la báscula pública para comprobar que, a pesar de que su figura se ensanchaba visiblemente, cada vez pesaba menos: se estaba transformando en una cáscara vacía, en un ser hueco. Y aunque también perdía vista rápidamente, era capaz de ver a la mujer de los ojos tristes en el metro. Quizá su condición espectral le permitía recordar el futuro.
  

  Yo me empecé a morir en Manhattan, en el verano de 1928. Desde luego, nadie se daba cuenta de mis muertes más que yo–la gente está demasiado ocupada con su propia vida para reparar en las pequeñas muertes de los demás–. Yo me daba cuenta porque después de cada muerte me daba fiebre y perdía peso. Me pesaba todos los días, para ver si el día anterior me había muerto. Y aunque no me ocurría tan seguido, fui perdiendo libras a una velocidad alarmante (nunca supe cuánto era en kilogramos).

  
  
  En todo caso, ambos narradores hablan, desde sus respectivos futuros, de aquel pasado en el que, aunque todavía no sabían que lo eran, sus fantasmas se cruzaron. Ahora, pasado el tiempo, no son más que tenues espíritus que, atrapados en sus particulares criptas, se recuerdan, se añoran e interactúan a través del tiempo y el espacio.
  

  En el metro, camino a casa, vi por última vez a Owen. Creo que me saludó con una mano. Pero ya no me importaba, ya no sentí ningún entusiasmo. El fantasma, me quedaba claro, era yo.

  
  
  Al principio de la novela, mientras la narradora comienza a escribir su propia novela sobre su juventud, advierte al lector:
  

  Lo único que perdura de aquel período son los ecos de algunas conversaciones, un puñado de ideas recurrentes, poemas que me gustaban y releía una y otra vez hasta aprenderlos de memoria. Todo lo demás es elaboración posterior. Mis recuerdos de esa vida no podrían tener mayor contenido. Son andamiajes, estructuras, casas vacías.

  
  Esas mismas frases se puede utilizar para explicar cómo funciona Los ingrávidos. Toda memoria es incompleta y contarla equivale a crearla de nuevo, a rellenar los huecos con el producto de nuestra propia imaginación. Este juego de fantasmas, realidades paralelas y saltos en el espacio y el tiempo, este tejido de narraciones que se mezclan, se interrumpen y se modifican unas a otras no hace sino iluminar los espacios oscuros que quedan entre ellas.
  
  En una de sus excursiones tras los pasos de Owen la narradora encontró en el edificio donde vivió en los años 20 un árbol muerto en una maceta que podría haber pertenecido al poeta. Se lo llevó a casa y comenzó a escribir notas sobre Owen en notas adhesivas, que pegaba en sus ramas secas.
  

  Volví varias veces a la biblioteca de la Universidad de Columbia, para buscar algún libro, periódico, archivo, lo que fuera que iluminara un poco el período que Owen pasó en Nueva York. Por recomendación de White, empecé a llevar un registro sobre todo lo que tuviera alguna relación con él. Tomaba notas en post-its amarillos y cuando llegaba a mi departamento los colocaba entre las ramas del árbol seco, para no olvidar, para poder regresar a ellas algún día y poner orden. La idea era que cuando el árbol estuviera atiborrado de notas, se empezarían a caer por su propio peso. Yo las recogería en el orden que se fueran cayendo y en ese mismo orden escribiría la vida de Owen.
  La primera fue: Nota: El metro de NY se construyó en 1904.

  
  
  Los ingrávidos, como el poema de Ezra Pound, está formada por una yuxtaposición de imágenes fugaces —“detalles luminosos” los llamaba Pound— colgando de las ramas secas de un árbol muerto hace décadas. Notas que, a pesar de que aparentemente no están relacionadas, cuentan una historia por acumulación.
  
  Por sus fragmentos organizados siguiendo emociones o significados más que una trama propiamente dicha la novela también puede ser leída como un homenaje al modernismo. Es, además, una celebración de un tiempo, el Renacimiento del Harlem, de libertad y bohemia, cuando la literatura era una forma de vida, ya fuera escribiendo o simplemente leyendo.
  Escrita bajo la influencia de Ezra Pound y su imagismo, de
  William Carlos Williams y de
  Emily Dickinson (que, como la narradora, pasó buena parte de su vida encerrada en su casa hablando con sus fantasmas), Los ingrávidos es una metáfora visual. Al igual que ese momento en que dos trenes circulan en paralelo y ves a otra persona a través de la ventana, su rostro fundiéndose con el reflejo del tuyo en el cristal, las historias que forman Los ingrávidos discurren paralelas y se mezclan por un momento unas con otras para luego seguir su camino. Caminos que, a pesar oscilar adelante y atrás en el tiempo, convergen al final de Los ingrávidos de una forma absolutamente brillante.
  
  En Las mil y una noches Scheherezade trata de prorrogar un día más su vida contando una historia tras otra. Sin embargo, tanto Owen como la narradora de Los ingrávidos parecen acercar la fecha de su muerte con cada historia, cada verso que escriben; la escritura les mantiene vivos y, a la vez, les desgasta, les vacía y, finalmente, les convierte en fantasmas: la ficción modifica la realidad y no viceversa, como nos gustaría pensar que sucede. “La ficción no tiene nada de inocente,” afirma Luiselli. “La ficción está en todas partes y gobierna nuestras vidas.” Los ingrávidos es, entre muchas otras cosas, un alegato a favor de la ficción.
  A fin de cuentas, si regresar es inevitable —“febril la mirada,” continúa el tango, “errante en las sombras, te busca y te nombra”—, y a la vez imposible, quizá la ficción sea el mejor lugar donde convertirse en un fantasma y vivir para siempre.
  
• 
  Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness)

  
  Who’s who? More pertinent who is telling this story. Whoever it so might be is telling it with the grand combination of piercing precision and poetry. She is as much a poet as a writer of prose.
  
  Much has been written about this book. Much theory and much of it a deserved praise. My first read didn’t coincide with the majority or even my own mental image. Rather than Luiselli sitting at her writing desk, she sits at a loom where silken braided wool of dizzying color unfolds across the wood planked floor woven into story upon and within story.
  
  My second read only reinforced the first, going against the majority of readers, and proved even more enjoyable. Intellectually, I understood other’s points of view. Never did I think mine was right. I questioned if there was a right but against such numbers, respected readers and sites, there might be. I imagine an author receives many letters, e-mails, asking for the correct version. They themselves can only offer their intention, not where their fiction chose to wander off or where mica chips of surprised wisdom lay exposed from their embedded nooks.
  
  Forgetting about right, wrong, and deciding not to bother the young Valeria Luiselli who is hopefully working on her next novel, I chose to stay with my reading which provided such enjoyment. Here I found a young woman in a large city living in an apartment which mirrors her inner being. Told in first person we enter easily that inner world which due to its thickened protective carapace is less than sparse. The small apartment contains only necessities, fold out kitchen table, a chair, hot plate, her writing desk and writing chair, a bathtub. More empty than it is full. It is situated within walking distance of her job where she translates literature and does research for a small publishing company. She likes her work. By sending missives describing the motions of her movements, the small events encountered, to her acquaintances she maintains the bare threads of a social net of existence. She is a writer and can write whenever she chooses. So it is enough. Yet others from this pot of acquaintances intrude upon this space. Usually to use her bathtub, sometimes to share her bed. She hovers between sympathy for them or simply part of what must be done sexually. There is no true physical, emotional engagement.
  
  During her routes through the various libraries to bring Spanish speaking author’s works to her boss she comes upon a poet, Gilberto Owen. Not only does she come upon him but becomes entangled in the web of identifying with another, another who is no longer alive. No real flesh and blood here. Her boss has other interests in publishing a better known poet. So, our protagonist reports she has made a find, Owen’s poems translated by this better known poet. She must now write-forge this fictional collection. Not a problem since she readily lies and steals in her life, a way of filling up her absent space within and a part of being…well of a writer, wavering between the thin boundary of imagination and the weight of the agreed upon reality. Her boss with a wink and a nod goes along with it seeing a possible coup. Indeed putting the collection out into the stream of literary marketing, the all but forgotten Owen (BTW he did exist. Look him up in Wikipedia which confirms life and death, existence if it needs to be arbitrated,) after an initial review has his work posthumously reviewed in more and more prestigious journals. His work is suddenly and surprisingly discovered at various institutions of higher learning. It is a beautifully rendered display of fiction creating reality, in this work of fiction.
  
  At her writing desk she works on her daily journal and at a novel. Although at the beginning and interspersed from there on, it appears her protagonist is the one actually writing the story in the book, in my hands. However,it is she the young woman of the sparse apartment and sparse inner identity who sits at her writing desk typing away. She writes about her protagonist writing this story. She works her way into this novel as what she imagines her life could-would be if more conventional-possibly what she might hope for if given the parts of her identity precluded by fear-were born. She composes herself as a housewife, the mother of a toddler and an infant, in a house outside the city, and married to a man, preoccupied with his work as an architect who has little common interest outside of mutually satisfying hot sex with her. There is little time for writing. Her occupation now is wiping snot, changing diapers, feeding young mouths. She is not a person who enjoys these parental things. She calls her three year old son, The Boy, and her infant, The Baby. Nor is she someone who enjoys, can barely tolerate social gatherings she needs to attend now that she is part of a couple.
  
  This novel the woman of the stark apartment is writing, is interspersed with scenes presumably from her diary entries of the life she is living now. A weaving and meshing. In her novel she has the the frustrated housewife leave out where her husband can readily see, the very same diary entries typed in her sparse apartment. This of course raises questions, did you really sleep with him, her, etc. Her housewife explains it away, that it is simply a novel she is working on.
  
  As she continues on as this constricted unhappy housewife she decides to begin writing another novel. Now working on two novels as many of us on GR read two, three books at the same time. This book is about the deceased poet Gilberto Owen, his little known life who she has researched and brought back to the public on paper. This is told through him, the partially fictionalized him taking the real facts the young woman at her writing desk has researched for her job, and the gaps filled in with subplots and fascinating characters. Also his torturous end.
  
  Without hearing the spin of the loom there are moments where her story, her housewife’s novel, and the Owens novel, begin to intermesh. Traces of their lives, events, emotional undercurrents, objects of deep metaphoric, symbolic meanings intermingle. As all three of the texts progress the weave pulls tighter, more pronounced with the fluidity of detail in its array of colors. There are especially moving scenes in the subway where true life exists as opposed to the meaningless scurry above. She the writer of the two novels sees Owen in the subway, as another one of the faces in the crowd entering, exiting his train. Once again capturing the transition of time in its indiscriminate passage, she the young writer muses that the subway would be an interesting conceit for showing the working of time. So a little while later, her’s and his train pass each other at the same speed enabling her to see him, he to see her. It must be her for like her, he has seen her before in this underground world. How could it not be her, she of the red coat buttoned up, the dark lines below the large brown eyes? She writes all this plus she has her work of translating and researching, and she has seen Owens and he, her as time stood still.
  
  As the writer of both novels at her writing desk with the time she wants to write, and both of her novels progressing all three converge, intertwine, enmesh, each affecting the others and therefore themselves. Within my hands that for some time were no longer holding the covers of a book, a capturing of identity and time appeared.
  
  This is a book that goes well beyond five stars, that goes beyond a rating system. It also leaves me in a quandary I have found myself in before. That is trying to describe her use of language and structure, her imagination, in words of mine which are inferior and bedeviled into worn out stock phrases. All I can do is to say that I was enthralled. At twenty six, she has created a masterpiece. How can this be? Do we need an answer? Hopefully not. And hopefully the stir of the media surrounding this book will not explode in creating a fictional version of her which she will feel the pressure to fulfill, crushing her golden touch. Another story, or the same.
  
  So, there you have it. I had tremendous enjoyment reading and writing about this book and these books within this book, the lives enmeshed together, the capture of time’s wayward movements. My concern, along with Luiselli’s much smoother transitions into who is writing what, than I was able to do and portray here, is that while writing this review I became more and more aware of my idiosyncratic interpretation, my biases. I can only hope that you as future reader now will not have your own reading of this book constricted or even worse, ruined. But hopefully, if you have made it this far down this snaked wind of a lengthy review you will have already seen that Luiselli has mastered that magic milieu where she leaves the precise width of a gap for the reader to slide into the story, where the freedom lies in become part of it.
  
  I hope you read it and if so with an open mind. Do not worry about holding the covers in your hands they will vanish soon enough.
• 
  Paltia

  Almost too enigmatic. When it gripped me, Luisella’s world was removed from my own only by a veil. In some places the veil was very thin. I could cross over to this world of characters and ghosts in celebration. This is an ephemeral tale like mists rising from a lake, a melody in the medley of clouds. It offers fleeting glimpses into imaginings and secrets. An imagining of something radiant, once viewed in motion - so easy to let slip between your fingers and be gone. A dreamlike story carried on the wind, night scented and filled with starlight.
• 
  Mir

  Ways to begin a book:
  

  I heard a fly buzz when I died.
  
  Of course all life is a process of breaking down.
  
  The novel will be narrated in the first person, by a tree a woman with a brown face and dark shadows under her eyes, who has perhaps died. The first line will be: "I heard a fly buzz when I died."
  
  It all happened in another city and another life.
  
  Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn.
  
  Beware! If you play at ghosts, you become one.

  
  
  
• 
  Zanna

  Arranged in short stream-of-consciousness style vignettes, this book is pretending not to be a novel, though what it is in disguise as is hard to pin down; is it a journal? A memoir? I am not very patient with plotless characterless fiction and I increasingly skimmed, but I did enjoy the presence of the toddler; his leavening questions and opinions.
  
  What distinguishes the book from others and makes it contemporary is its close-to-the-boneness, its disturbingly risky-seeming self-referentiality. In this, it reminded me of Stevie Smith's autobiographical not-really-novels, and it might also claim The Hour of the Star among its relations in terms of subject and tone. However, in contrast to Lispector's, Luiselli's narrator lives a literary texture, haunted by poets and poetry.
  
  Luiselli made me feel my own emotional inadequacy at least; she made me feel that there was someone to feel for in the protagonist, even if I could not actually feel for her. The anecdote about the deleted lines of Ezra Pound's heartfelt poem was my favourite thought. The faces in the crowd, the wet petals, the shadows of love and memory: here Lusielli manages literature's magic trick, the resurrection of feeling.
• 
  Vipassana

  Literature has produced a lot of interesting ideas for the world. It has also produced a lot of interesting experiments with words. Often, I'm satisfied if a book can do one of those two things well, but I feel throughly outwitted now that Valeria Luiselli has done both and twice. Yes, I read the book twice. Cover to cover. One time immediately after the other. I haven't done that since Harry Potter in middle school.
  
  At the heart of the novella is a puzzle. The flux between fact and fiction. Valeria Luiselli lived in Harlem, NY. Her bond with the place developed through the letters of Gilberto Owen, a Mexican poet who also lived in Harlem in the 20s. She began a novel as well, made notes before her marriage. She was different woman then.

  In that first New York of my early twenties, I decided that I despised writers who admitted to crying over art or beauty or solitude, those who indulged in elevated states of mind. I would renounce those who feigned innocence or slight stupidity in order to create empathy in their readers; I would never fall into the trap of candor. I would read only the bastards (Pound), the crooked (Eliot), the strange (Cravan and Loy). I liked those who seemed to be unyielding, especially toward themselves*.

  After her marriage and pregnancy, she became a creature of habit. Reading only in public libraries, only in the same seat. She became distant from the person she was when she first encountered Owen. The voice of the person was not her's anymore, but a memory's. She chose to stick with the same novel but use the voice of the present, the one that she was now comfortable with. If I had to be reductionist and use my imagination a bit, I could say thar the entire novel is Valeria Luiselli was exploring the possibilities that arose from a quagmire created by her archive of notes. It revealed her of the past and her bond with Owen, while being in the present.
  
  Unlike all the other fragmented novels I've read, this one has several trails of vignettes. All clearly related, but precisely how remains veiled. Clues are carefully withheld, at no point does the reader feel entirely lost, but there is a constant murmur of doubt. The vignettes do what vignettes do best, the capture a variety of ideas in a way that standard storytelling cannot. There are the scandalous ones...

  We listened to records while gently touching legs and shoulders, lounging on the couch or the floor, generating false hopes of a degenerate orgy that never occurred

  ... and the painfully, sensually self-aware ones.

  Spontaneous gesture paralyze me. I could have touched his face; licked the naked scar that furrowed it into two possible faces. I could have told him that I was going because I was incapable of sustaining and inhabiting the worlds I myself had fabricated, that I also had a scar splitting my face into two.

  Valeria Luiselli is very clever, a kind of genius: the highest degree of being mentally pulled to pieces and the highest degree of being collected.* She is what people call a writer's writer. The boundless nature of post modern fiction allows the reader to wander, instead of follow. The genius of Valeria Luiselli is the structure, a porous novel where she creates space to wander and walls to order. The walls are that of the puzzle and the puzzle is like a maze. Who can resist running into maze? Conventionally a maze has one exit, perhaps this one too. Perhaps it has many and each exit opens up a different horizon. What is the point of a maze with many exits? I don't know. Yet, while I was constantly looking for a solution, an exit, I enjoyed being in the maze enough for me to do it a second time.
  
  The tone in the novel is one I adore. The narrators say perhaps a lot. In Spanish, that must roll beautifully on the tongue,
  Quizas. Interestingly, they're very certain about "remembering the future" and "ghosts" but not the more worldly ideas.
  
  Faces in the Crowd has the elements of a Zen Koan. Maybe even the most famous Zen Koan.

  Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?

  I hear a sound alright, but Valeria Luiselli has provoked a great doubt as to how I'm hearing these sounds.
  
  --
  *Parts taken from
  this piece which also contains a few of the ideas in the book (not in a spoiler sort of way).
  
  **Her description of the book is
  here.
  
  --
  June 3, 2015
• 
  A

  Horray! All along I thought that these sorts of pretentious, overhyped, numb, intellectually empty, stylistically overwrought novels that tout conservative suburban values in the guise of urban sophistication were the exclusive provenance of irritating white hipster boys who live in Brooklyn. But Luiselli has proven that these exercises in dullness that are lapped up by the literati can be churned out by non-white hipster girls who live in Manhattan, too! This is what I call progress!
• 
  Lynne King

  This book looked a fascinating read but soon proved to be all too dreamlike for me.
  
  It didn't hold my interest and even after a quick skim through looking for something magical to captivate me, as authors sometimes take a while to warm up, I was still left lukewarm in my thoughts.
  
  On to another book... life is too short...
• 
  Cheryl

  A neck sprain from whiplash, a headache, some nerve pain, a few pills—probably not the best time to read "a horizontal novel, told vertically. A novel that has to be told from the outside in order to be read from within."
  
  Three pulsating stories, fragmented narratives occurring on the page in delicately punctuated prose portraits, flowing out of and into each other, sometimes emerging softly like streams, sometimes crashing against each other like rough waves. A puzzling occurrence.
  
  This is "a vertical novel told horizontally. A story that has to be seen from below, like Manhattan from the subway."It is the abstract painting you view from different angles, the kind you never fully grasp, still, the creativity you admire.
  
  Radiating pain. A moment to appreciate life, while reading "a dense, porous novel. Like a baby's heart."
• 
  merixien

  Kitaba, dün akşam Okumamak’ın Valeria Luiselli bölümünü okuduktan sonra başladım. Anlatıcıya asla güvenemediğiniz ama kurgular içinde kaybolmaktan da kendinizi alamadığınız kitaplardan. En yakın örnek sanırım Yıldızın Saati olabilir. Okurken yoruldum ama değdi. Valeria Luiselli’nin çok kendine has bir tarzı var zaten. İsimsiz bir metinde görseniz dahi tanırsınız. Güvenilmez bir anlatıcı, edebiyata ayrılan bölümler, isimsiz aile üyeleri ve belirsiz zaman kaymaları. Okurken içinde kaybolduğum kitaplar yazıyor, çok seviyorum kendisini.
• 
  Alejandra Arévalo

  "Si te dedicas escribir novelas, te dedicas a doblar el tiempo"
  
  Creo que esa frase resume casi todo lo que sucede en la novela. Todas las historias que suceden al mismo tiempo y al final se encuentran gracias a la escritura. Sin embargo, no termino de entender varias situaciones de la novela, o más bien no termino de encajar qué sucede realmente. Asumo que es el tono onírico, fantasmal, que quiere darle Valeria Luiselli a la narrativa, esta idea de que nada está pasando pero en realidad algo detrás es sumamente profundo y filosófico. No sé. Pero finalmente eso es lo que para mí no termina de encajar. Como si estuviera esperando que pasara algo y no pasa nada. Y, lo entiendo, tambi��n es una forma de narrar, pero no lo siento bien logrado. O quizás no es mi estilo. Me gusta la relación entre Gilberto Owen, la escritora y su yo joven y cómo éstos se interceptan en algunos puntos pero nada más no me hace click. En fin, el libro va del caos y la idea a lo ordenado y particular y cómo encajan todos los personajes mencionados en la historia, eso es lo que yo considero que salva la novela y puedes ver cómo la gran estructura.
• 
  Hakan

  Kayıp Çocuklar Arşivi ile burada da epey övgü toplayan Meksikalı yazar Luiselli’nin 28 yaşındayken 2011’de yayınlanan ilk romanıymış Kalabalıkta Yüzler. Kısa bölümlerden oluşan, anlatıcıların değiştiği, ama bunu ancak anlatılanlarla fark edebildiğiniz, gerçekle fantezinin iç içe geçtiği değişik bir kurgusu var. Şairler (Lorca, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound ve daha ağırlıklı olarak da Gilberto Owen) önemli bir yer tutuyor. Biraz Bolaño’yu, belki de daha çok Vila-Matas’ı andırıyor bu yönüyle. Ama farkını da ortaya koyarak. Kitabın ilk yarısı daha çok hoşuma gitti. Ana kahramanın çocukları, eşi, tuhaf dostlarıyla yaşadıkları bakımından etkileyici bölümler var. Ancak giderek dağılıyor roman. Gilberto Owen devreye girince iyice uçuyor. Yine de okuması keyif veren, şaşırtan bir roman. Başta değindiğim üçüncü ve en düz anlatımlı romanı olduğu anlaşılan Kayıp Çocuklar Arşivi’ni de yakında okumayı planlıyorum. Çevirmen Seda Ersavcı da her zamanki gibi çok iyi iş çıkarmış. Kapak ve baskı da çok iyi, bir tebrik de yayınevi Siren’e.
• 
  Jenny (Reading Envy)

  "In Mexico City, a young mother is writing a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. In Harlem, a translator is desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains."
  
  I loved
  Lost Children Archive by this author, which she wrote in English, and I think you can see early evidence of that author here - themes of husband and two children, the imagined lives of author/scholars she is interacting with, interweaving narratives. I think LCA is the better book, but this was enjoyable enough.
  
  Each of these narrators interacts with even more known names and there is this sense that maybe they are really there, but also maybe not. And all the narratives connect in unexpected ways. With the young boy's ghost obsession, it makes that question more complicated. Owen is friends with Lorca, but also Homer & Langley, Nella Larsen, etc. The young translator sees her husband as Owen even though their places in time are not the same. And so on. A lot of the dropped names will be more enjoyable if you recognize them - I would say I knew 3/4, and that's pretty good, thank goodness I read Doctorow's
  Homer & Langley at some point eh.
  
  This is translated by Christina MacSweeney so would be a great Women in Translation Month title to read later this year - she also has to try to show multiple translations from English to Spanish in the original as variants in English again, very heady. I wonder how different the writing process is when you switch from writing in Spanish to writing in English. I've picked up from conversation around Moreno-Garcia that it is far more lucrative to publish in English and hard to break into publishing in Mexico.
• 
  Hulyacln

  ‘Yatay anlatılan dikey bir roman.’
  Belki de tam tersi, aslında her şey iç içe geçmiş durumda.
  İki çocuklu bir kadın, tam zamanlı anneliği ve eş oluşuyla birlikte kitap yazmaya çalışıyor. Bir görünüp bir kaybolan hayaletler hakkında. Metal yığını metrolardan, ağır kokulu kalabalık odalara mekanlar değişiyor. Yazdıkça gerçek ve kurgu birbiriyle yoğruluyor.
  Kadın yoruluyor bunu hissediyoruz.
  Yazdığı her cümle eşinin süzgecinden geçiyor, attığı adımlar çocukları tarafından takip ediliyor sanki.. Kitabındaki karakterler ise özerkliğini ilan edercesine seslerini yükseltiyor. Kadın yazmak, yaratmak, nefes almak istiyor.
  .
  Arka kapak yazısında yer alan şu cümle gibi: “sessiz bir roman, çocuklar uyanmasın diye.”
  .
  Valeria Luiselli, Kayıp Çocuk Arşivi’nde beni büyülemişti. Diğer eserlerini de okumalıydım elbet! Kalabalıkta Yüzler de beni şaşırttı. Çok zor bir metin bunu söylemeliyim, karakterin yazdığı eser ve bugününe dair anlattıkları yer yer şeffaflaşıyor. Ancak bu zorluğu seviyorsanız, kesinlikle bir şans verilmeli. Dalgalanmalar mevcut, kitap zemini de oldukça kaygan. Ben sevdim mi? Evet!
  .
  Çeviride yine yeniden Seda Ersavcı!
  .
  Kapak tasarımına ise bayıldım! Nazlım Dumlu çalışması .
• 
  Wyndy

  There are far more erudite reviews of this book on Goodreads than I could ever write. I will say this dense, complex novella will challenge your brain cells. It will require your full attention to navigate its multiple layers and fragments. And you will either like it or loathe it. There are no chapters, no linear plot and, in parts of the story, no names, which for me was a layer unto itself.
  
  Two of my favorite lines from the book, taken out of context (because everything in this novel is about context):
  
  “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 . . .”
  Don’t we all. Truth #1
  
  “That apartment gradually filled up with plants, silent presences that from time to time reminded me that the world required care and perhaps even affection.”
  It does indeed. Truth #2
  
  Recommended to anyone looking for an unconventional, confounding, intelligent read. I’ll be adding more Valeria Luiselli to my TR list.
  
• 
  Jonathan

  Lovely. The other reviews already up here will tell you why.
• 
  A. Raca

  "Çok uzun süre yalnız yaşadığınızda hâlâ hayatta olduğunuzu teyit etmenin tek yolu eylem ve nesneleri açık bir şekilde anlaşılır söz dizimiyle ifade etmektir: bu yüz, yürüyen bu kemikler, bu ağız, yazı yazan bu el."
  
  "Ev eşyalarına bel bağlamanın doğru olmadığını bilirdim; bir şeyin sessiz varlığına alıştığınız an, o şey ya kırılır ya da ortadan kaybolur."
  
  Geçmişle güncel arasında gidip gelen, biraz kafa karıştırıcı, bazen karakterin cinsiyetinin değiştiği bir kitap. Anlık düşünceler gelip gidiyor, nerede olduğunuzu şaşırıyorsunuz. Çok sevdim.
  
• 
  Aslıhan Çelik Tufan

  06.04.21
  
  Yazarın daha önce "Dişlerimin Hikayesi" kitabını okuyup çok sevmiştim. Pek çok okur "Kayıp Çocuk Arşivi" kitabıyla yazara aşina ama ben henüz onu okuyamadım.
  
  Üslubu, derdi çok başka bir kalem. Böyle dediğime bakmayın, gayet sizin benim kederlerimizin ekseninde akan ama hiç ummadığımız kadar değişik bir şekilde bunu bize sunuyor.
  
  Kitap iki koldan akıyor. Biz bir yandan iki çocuk annesi evli mutlu ve ev hanımı olan yazarımızın karakterinin romanını bir yandan da anlatıcımızı dinliyoruz. Kimi zaman iki kurgu birbirine geçiyor, kitap bi noktada okuru da yoruyor. Sebat ederseniz seversiniz ama bence herkese göre değil.
  
  "Sessiz bir roman, çocuklar uyanmasın diye."
  
  Keyifli okumalar 🌼
  #readingismycardio #aslihanneokudu #okudumbitti #2021okumalarım #okuryorumu #kitaptavsiyesi #neokudum #sirenkitap #sirenyayınları #kalabalıktayüzler #valerialuiselli #çevirikitaplar
• 
  Arezo

  چند شب پیش توییتی با این عنوان خوندم :
  توی مکان‌های خیلی شلوغ می‌نشستم و زیر نور آفتاب مطالعه می‌کردم. راستش لذت خوابیدن توی هر تختی جز مال خودم دقیقا همین بود. اینکه می‌توانستم زود بیدار شوم، سریع بزنم بیرون، روزنامه‌ای درست و حسابی بخرم و آن را در نور طبیعی روز بخوانم.
  
  این متنی از این کتاب بود و بعد از خوندش شروع به خوندنش کردم 💃
  
  داستانش پیچیده‌ست، مترجم هم اصلا ترجمه‌ی خوبی نداشته و واقعا اذیت کننده بود 🤦‍♀️
  ولی داستانش رو دوست داشتم، اینکه نمیتونستی تشخیص بدی راوی الان کدوم شخصیته بنظرم جالب بود و نقطه‌ی عطف این کتاب بود.
  
  قبلا از این نویسنده جستار " اگر به خودم برگردم " از نشر اطراف رو خونده بودم و اون رو هم دوست داشتم🤝🏻
• 
  Deniz Balcı

  Kurmaca ile gerçekliğin birbirinin içine geçtiği, birbirine paralel ya da dikey üç belki beş (nereden baktığınıza göre değişen bir durum) hikayenin anlatıldığı bir roman bu.
  
  İlkin bu çok katmanlı yapıyı, eğlenceli bulduğumu söyleyebilirim. Fakat bir müddet sonra yazarın neyi anlattığı, neyden bahsettiği üzerine çok fazla düşünmeniz, sürekli olarak bir cümle, bir kelime ile anlatılmak istenileni yakalama ihtiyacı hissediliyor, haliyle çok yorucu bir süreç başlıyor.
  
  Yazarların kendinden önceki yazarları, şairleri romanlarında karakter haline getirmelerini severim aslında ama burada her şey fazla belirsiz. Çok itinayla karıştırmış çorbayı Luiselli. O yüzden kitabın sonlarına doğru iyice koptum eserden. Belki doğru zamanda okumadım, yanlış bir dönemime denk geldi bilemiyorum yalnız çok fazla artçı deprem geçiren hikayeler bozdu beni.
  
  Siren Yayınları, ne bassa okurum dediğim bir yayınevi. Jaguar yayınlarında da olduğu gibi ne yayımlasalar düşünmeden alıyorum. Bu sefer pek güldürmediler ama yine de Meksika edebiyatından böyle genç ve farklı bir örnek okuduğum için memnun kaldım.
  
  6/10
• 
  Nahed.E

  التجربة الثانية مع الأدب المكسيكي، القراءة الأولي في هذا العام
  فكرة القراءة لأديب لاتيني جديد لم أكن اعرفه من قبل، هي اكثر شئ يجذبني ويفرحني بغض النظر عن متعة الرواية، وهل اعجبتني ام لا .. فالأمر اذواق، ولكن المتعة في حد ذاتها بالنسبة لي تكمن في الابحار مع نوفيلا لاتينية، او إسبانية، او إيطالية او برتغالية .. هذا الابحار الغامض دون أي توقع هو مكسب في حد ذاته، ويستحق النجمة الاولي
  
  اما النجمة الثانية فللمجهود، والسرد، والبعد الفلسفي في الرواية ...
  للاسف لم تجذبني من حيث الفكرة، او ربما لم تصلح لي كمود عام هذه الفترة .. لن اظلمها معي .. الرواية تستحق المحاولة والصبر دون شك .