A multi-layered story told by two narrators: a 21st-century Emily Dickinson living in Mexico City who relates to the world vicariously through her children and a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a dying poet living in a run-down apartment in Philadelphia in the 1950s. While she tells the story of her past as a young editor in New York City desperately trying to convince a publisher to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen-an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence constantly haunts her in the subway-she also relates the slow but inevitable disintegration of her present family life.
Faces in the Crowd
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As spare, strange and beautiful as the Ezra Pound lines from which it takes its name, Faces in the Crowd is a first novel born out of the idea of disappearing. Its author, however, the 28-year-old Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, is going to have to get used to her own visibility: the book confirms her as an extraordinary new literary talent --Daily Telegraph
Luiselli's novel stands apart from most Latin American fiction … Faces in the Crowd signals the appearance of an exciting female voice to join a new wave of Latino writers --Observer
A young Mexican author with seemingly boundless intellect ... There are echoes of García Márquez's Strange Pilgrims; Bolaño, Hemingway and Emily Dickinson are all freely cited. The prose has luminous touches --Guardian
Luiselli's novel stands apart from most Latin American fiction … Faces in the Crowd signals the appearance of an exciting female voice to join a new wave of Latino writers --Observer
A young Mexican author with seemingly boundless intellect ... There are echoes of García Márquez's Strange Pilgrims; Bolaño, Hemingway and Emily Dickinson are all freely cited. The prose has luminous touches --Guardian
About the Author
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983. She published a book of personal essays entitled FAKE PAPERS in 2010 and her work has been published in magazines and newspapers such as Letras Libres and the New York Times. She has also written ballet librettos for the New York City Ballet and is currently studying for a PhD in Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
The title comes from a famous two-line 'imagist' poem of Ezra Pound. Apparently (I did not know this till I read this book), the two lines are all Pound preserved from a 300 line poem he'd written after seeing the apparition of a dead friend on the New York metro.
This novel is told in very short bursts each separated from the next by an asterisk. In the opening part, some of the segments relate to the narrator's earlier life and loves in New York, some relate to her life as a writer in the present (the jacket tells us - I somehow missed this - that this is in Mexico City). As the novel goes on, you realise that the second, non-present, voice is now that of an author she's been interested in in her earlier. This life takes place mostly around 1950 but with memories of living in Harlem at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. The narrator and the second narrator each have visions of the other on the Metro. The second narrator believe has died on a number of occasions, is becoming blind, and in fact turning into a ghost.
I hope this synopsis gives a sense both of the plot and of how challenging the book is to read. The short episodes do make for interesting reading, but are very much themselves like short imagist poems...
This novel is told in very short bursts each separated from the next by an asterisk. In the opening part, some of the segments relate to the narrator's earlier life and loves in New York, some relate to her life as a writer in the present (the jacket tells us - I somehow missed this - that this is in Mexico City). As the novel goes on, you realise that the second, non-present, voice is now that of an author she's been interested in in her earlier. This life takes place mostly around 1950 but with memories of living in Harlem at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. The narrator and the second narrator each have visions of the other on the Metro. The second narrator believe has died on a number of occasions, is becoming blind, and in fact turning into a ghost.
I hope this synopsis gives a sense both of the plot and of how challenging the book is to read. The short episodes do make for interesting reading, but are very much themselves like short imagist poems...
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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4.0 out of 5 stars
1 review
4.0 out of 5 stars
An intriguing new voice from Mexico
18 Mar 2013
By Sue Terry
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
A non-linear novel set in Mexico and New York about a writer trying to marry her life of the imagination with the real world in which she's wife and mother. Real people appear alongside fictional ones, the chronology slips between the past and the present, and fact is layered with fiction so that they almost become indistinguishable. A read that requires concentration but is worth the effort. A new and different voice.
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