It’s been such a long time since I caught you up with what I’m reading. There were so many brilliant potential picks for this month’s book club, because my summer has had a plentiful harvest of paperbacks. Stand outs have included My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent, which is worth all of the hype because I devoured it in about 2 days, Solitude by Michael Harris, which is one of the best books I’ve read recently about pursuing moments of a solitary life, and Hello World by Hannah Fry, which is a fascinating and accessible guide to some of the algorithms that shape our modern world.
But, today I want to write about Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli and translated by Christina MacSweeney. It’s a short book that I picked up, almost at random, off someone else’s shelf and that I may not have found otherwise. So I wanted to display it on my digital bookshelf, which is how I see this book club, so you might be a little more inclined to pick it up too.
Faces in the Crowd weaves between three stories. “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.”
Each tale is layered on top of the other creating what the mother calls a “vertical narrative”. The layers are short fragments which could be anything from a line to a page long, which give the story an unsettling unstable position of narration. Stories disintegrate and disappear into one another.
While Owen and the younger translator are characters in their own right, they also appear as constructions by the mother as she writes. At one point, the unnamed translator—who is a younger version of the mother and also a character in the mother’s novel—talks about her acts of forgery to an old man who asks: “So what does it matter if he [Gilberto Owen] never met Lorca or saw Duke Ellington play?” “It doesn’t, I’m just saying he could have,” the translator says. “Exactly,” replies the old man, “and that’s what matters.”
So as much as this is a book about literature and translation and storytelling, it’s also about how we fabricate ourselves and the lives of those we encounter. The novel is filled with glances across packed metro stations, where characters see faces in a crowd and turn them from mere faces into people who feel so well fictionalised they might just be real. They tell the stories that they want to hear, the stories that fit with their own personal narratives.
For this alternative cover, I wanted the layered text to mirror the layered narrative surrounded by individual fragments.
The outcome is something so surreal but at once so close to how we actually encounter the world. How we exist in our own heads is different to how we exist in the minds of others and vice versa. We are constantly retelling our own narratives in fragments, picking up memories, changing them slightly each time we do, and relating them to our present.
Faces in the Crowd is a challenging read. It can be heard to follow in places and it pushes you to add your own interpretations and fabrications into your reading. It’s probably not going to be a big beach side read. But if you’re prepared to work with Luiselli, there’s some real magic to be made in this one.
SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ…
- As the book progresses, how do you know which storyline you’re in? Does it matter?
- What are the points of similarity between the narrator and Owen? Where do they merge?
- What is fact and what is fiction? How can you tell? Is your perception of the fabrication the same as the narrator’s?
- What impact does telling the story in such fragments have on your perception of the told and untold aspects of the narrator’s life?
- Have you ever caught a glimpse of someone in a crowd who you thought was someone else?
IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…
- The Observer heralds Luisella as an exciting female voice joining a new wave of Lating American authors
- The Rumpus discusses Faces in the Crowd as a “haunted novel” filled with fragments of ghosts
- Stephen Piccarella writing for Electric Lit writes that “it is here in these spaces that open at the end of the novel that the writing of fiction really begins”
IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…
- Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet
- Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude
- Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Projectw
