Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli – review | Books | The Observer 12/12/12 11.

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Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli –

review
With this debut novel an exciting female voice joins a new wave of
Latin American authors

Mina Holland
The Observer, Sunday 6 May 2012

'Transcending time and place': Valeria Luiselli. Photograph: Alfredo Pelcastre

Latin American fiction has long distorted the real and imagined, leaving readers unsure
of where one ends and the other begins. The first novel by Mexican-born writer Valeria
Luiselli pushes this idea further. The narrator's reality becomes closely interwoven with
fiction, her life eventually indistinguishable from that of little-known Mexican poet
Gilberto Owen.

Faces in the Crowd Our nameless narrator, unhappily married with two children, is
by Valeria Luiselli
writing from Mexico City, where she feels "short of breath" and
craves "narrative order". She sets out to write a novel, to create a
space of her own to inhabit. We meet her motley group of
acquaintances, none more vividly remembered than the ghost of
Gilberto Owen, a marginal figure in the Harlem Renaissance of
the 20s and 30s. Her interest in Owen, purely professional at
first, spirals into obsession. She sees him on the subway, and her
life begins to mirror his.

Then Owen's voice creeps into the prose. He too rides the subway
Buy it from the each day, and weighs himself to find that – despite his growing
Guardian bookshop size – he is becoming lighter. He starts to see, "on parallel
Search the Guardian tracks", a ghost-like "woman with sad eyes" – our narrator – and
bookshop
yet he grows steadily blinder. He stops showing up in
photographs. He is a "3lb fat blind man" who is "rubbing
Search
[him]self out". The two characters are dissolving into one
Tell us what you
think: Star-rate and another's worlds.

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Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli – review | Books | The Observer 12/12/12 11.01

review this book

Luiselli's novel stands apart from most Latin American fiction.
She avoids worn-out narratives about drug wars and violence,
and her downbeat supernaturalism feels quite different from the magical realism of
Gabriel García Márquez. Concerned, above all, with literature's ability to transcend time
and space, Faces in the Crowd signals the appearance of an exciting female voice to join
a new wave of Latino writers.

The author plants ideas – like suggesting that all the characters are dead throughout –
that are never confirmed. She leaves us juggling with possibilities. I tweeted her,
observing she had omitted an overarching message or concrete conclusion. She
concurred: "I don't believe in the 'grand finale'. I hate Wagner."

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