Into the unknown

 Valeria Luiselli's  novel “faces in the crowd” kinda felt unsatisfactory and not because nothing happens, but because what happens keeps folding in on itself and made me a little confused reading it because she kept blurring the line between who's writing, who's being written, and whether any of it is "real" in the first place. The base of the novel is essentially a young Mexican woman living in New York City, translating poetry and becoming obsessed with the “non-mainstream” Mexican poet Gilberto Owen. But that's only one layer. She's also a mother in Mexico City, years later, writing a novel about her younger self. And Owen himself starts appearing. LITERALLY walking through her pages, her memories or even maybe her hallucinations. The narrative shuttles between times, cities, and perspectives until you're not entirely sure whose story you're reading anymore. And this is what made this novel so cool but also kinda confusing to follow which obviously was the point of how it was written, 

What makes the book feel so cool is how Luiselli uses structure to mirror different themes. The chapters are short, sometimes just a few paragraphs, and they jump between timelines without warning. It's disorienting at first, but that's the point. The narrator is trying to reconstruct a version of herself that no longer exists. Her life before kids, when she was living in New York, or herself that just was free and believed in freedom in art, without framework. Kind of like the other novel we read about memory, it follows a similar structure in trying to mirror memory. 

There's also something genuinely playful about the way Luiselli shows being an author. The narrator is writing a novel, but her characters start acting as if they’re trying to go against her, developing wills of their own. Owen, in particular, becomes less a historical figure and more a ghost she can't shake. The thin line between author and character shows something real about how we construct identity through storytelling and how fragile those constructions are.

Translation is a major theme in this book, and not just because the narrator works as a translator. She's constantly moving between languages, countries, and selves. There's a recurring sense of being caught in the middle (between English and Spanish) or youth and adulthood and especially between the person you were and the person you're becoming. Luiselli writes about this in-betweenness without romanticizing it. And shes kind of making it seem not like this super big deal but kind of the realness and the reality of it. 

Owen is caught in between 2 stages of life and shows the struggle of trying to find who you are. I think a time i will be really able to relate to this is when I graduate and trying to find the person i am as not being a student. Which is something everyone goes through but no one really talks about. And like kind of contemplating your entire degree and thinking was this really what I wanted to do with my life?  Owen was a real poet who spent time in New York and faded into this self that did not feel like himself. he becomes a kind of ghost presence in the novel. I think the narrator quite well described this feeling of in betweenness and really focused it on him to embody that feeling. Which i thought was very relatable in a way, just in a different stage of life.