LAST BOOK OF THE COURSE!!!!

With this being the 9th and final book I am reading for this course, it feels very melancholy. As I am not a big fan of reading books in general, having read a book almost every week for this term feels like a major accomplishment. In addition, some of the books I genuinely actually enjoyed such as "Money To Burn" - Ricardo Piglia. Unfortunately, the last book of this term was not one of them. "Faces in the crowd" - by Valeria Luiselli was a very confusing read with multiple main characters, such as the young mother with a messy marriage and Owen, a divorced, going blind alcoholic. The way the novel switches between these two and as well, them talking about their present and past and not highlighting any of the change of perspectives makes me extremely confused throughout the whole read.

In the first half of the novel, it was more about the struggling mother of two kids that is married to an architect. As she recollects her past memories when she used to frolic around with multiple men such as Moby, baldy and her friend Dakota. In addition, since the story was constantly changing perspectives and the author did not spend much time going in depth with these characters, I never really understood or cared about any of them. Her husband is also getting constantly more suspicious of her work as it gets more and more descriptive of her past. As well, describing her daily life taking care of her kids and being with her husband, it felt like her soul was slowly dissipating, losing parts of herself and her identity. She felt like she was drifting and had no purpose in life.

Then, she got interested in the poems of Gilberto Owen, and the perspective changed into Owen himself.  Owen himself was a drunkard, going blind and reminiscing about his glory days back in the 1920s. Furthermore, he liked to hallucinate and see the narrator in the metro stations.

To be honest, I did not understand when his perspectives changed from past to present and was all over the place. Every time I finished reading a mini sub-story, it felt like it was disappearing and mending into another complex puzzle piece that I needed to fit into this whole story. Even after finishing up this blog post, I still think I don't understand this novel completely with each tale linked on top of each other.

Discussion Question:

How does the fragmented narrative style and the shifting perspectives between the young mother and Gilberto Owen change your view of this book?


Comments

  1. TesiApril 2, 2024 at 8:04 PM

    Andrew, sorry that we closed with a book that wasn’t of your liking! I will push back and say that she actually does go into excrutianting detail aboout these characters and her relationship to them. We even get to hear about their shower routines (hair in the soap?) and little quirky details such as what Dakota does with a bucket. We even know about Pajarote's course work in school. Maybe it's that she doesn't tell us all the details about all of them at once that confused you? You did pick up on how her present life is "slowly dissipating, maker her loose parts of herself and her identity." I'm getting the feeling, although I might be wrong, that you might not have finished the book before writing this post since the end actually does overlap both stories! I won't spoil the ending for you in case thats it. Make sure you finish reading before class!

    Thanks for your comment!
    - Tesi

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  2. Nathan HarrisApril 2, 2024 at 10:34 PM

    Hey Andrew, I agree that the constantly shifting perspectives definitely made it tricky to follow at times. To be honest, I don't think the fragmented narrative style really changed my perspective of the book, I'd probably have disliked it just as much without it. Overall, I have nowhere near as much to say about this book as I do about all the others I read in the course, I just didn't really grasp the point or message.
    -Nathan Harris

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