Faces in the Crowd

In Valeria Luiselli’s “Faces in the Crowd,” the reader is taken into a world in which the lines between truth and fiction, past and present, are not just mixed, they are purposely hidden. This makes me think about what it means to tell a story and who we are.

The investigation of the concept of disappearance is at the core of the book. The main character, a young mother and writer from Mexico City, struggles with her identity while trying to publish a book on her time spent in New York and her interest in a little-known poet from Mexico named Gilberto Owen. Her story is disjointed, reflecting the disorder and disruptions in her day-to-day existence as a mother of two little children. This disintegration felt like a metaphor for how her sense of self is vanishing under the weight of parenthood and household duties, which I’m sure a lot of mom’s till date can relate to.

It appears that Luiselli enjoys guiding us through her narrative labyrinth. The book reads like a collection of short stories or snapshots, each giving a hint about a character’s inner life but never giving the whole story. It was like being at a party where you keep meeting new people and never get to know them because of the way she jumps about between short stories, never quite allowing you settle into one viewpoint, which was so confusing by the way. Even yet, there’s an underlying excitement that despite the occasional annoyance never goes away because, in all its chaotic brilliance, I find that the novel reflects the erratic, messy rhythm of life itself, which makes reading it both strangely unforgettable and unexpectedly intimate. Similar to how the protagonist is attempting to piece together her own identity and Owen’s enigmatic character, this format presents obstacles for the reader to put together the story. 

One quotation that caught my attention was “Novels need a sustained breath… I have a baby and a boy. They don’t let me breathe. Everything I write is—has to be—in short bursts. I’m short of breath” It appears as though Luiselli saw into the confusion of attempting to balance the responsibilities of life with the desire to create. As a reader, it pushed me to stop and consider the craft of writing as a process that’s chiseled out in fleeting moments, in between the chaos of everyday life, rather than as an unbroken flow. This thought that perhaps the secret to creation isn’t having the luxury of infinite time, but rather mastering the ability of making the most of each breath we are able to steal from the demands of our daily life stood out to me. 

This book is therefore about how we create our own lives and the lives of those we meet, in addition to literature, translation, and narrative. The book is full of scenes where characters are looking around crowded metro stations, and they recognize faces in the crowd and transform them from faces into individuals that feel so perfectly fictitious that they may actually be real. They tell the stories that suit their own narratives and the ones they want to hear.

This gets me to my conclusion (I think this is our last blog post, or at least our last book, which makes me sad) and my question for discussion for today: The book presents writing as something that occurs in “short bursts” because of life’s unforeseen events. In the craziness of your own life, how do you find creativity?