s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]'s Reviews > Faces in the Crowd

If you dedicate your life to writing novels, you’re dedicating yourself to folding time.

Literature has a seemingly magical ability to fill the cracks of reality with fiction, creating a monument to the human condition. Valeria Luiselli’s impressive first novel, Faces in the Crowd in the English translation or Los Ingrávidos (‘The Weightless’) in the original Spanish, is a sagacious statement to the powers of literature, openly examining the mechanics of writing as if in an exhibition of regality. Adorned in the spirit of classic Latin American literature such as the trailblazing Pedro Páramo, Faces strikes a fresh pose for a new century and is surely to become canonized into the great literary tradition from which it springs. She has created a cast of characters from reality, like Federico García Lorca, and the imaginary and set them walking about the streets of New York and Philadelphia; these characters are ghosts of an age now gone that still speak as loudly and poignantly today. ‘A horizontal novel, told vertically,’ Luiselli explores the poetic gap between author and character, plunging oneself further into the realm of words and building layer upon layer of sensationally surreal mingling between the creator and the created until the defining boundaries become practically nonexistent and irrelevant.

‘the tabula rasa of the pages and plans, the anonymity the multiple voices of the writing offer me’

Luiselli offers all the glorious metaphysical and metafictional platforms of literature in her multi-layered story. A woman who never leaves home writes a novel about a younger character-version of herself as a poetry translator determined to bring her obsession with under-known poet Gilbreto Owen into print for the masses.

I know I need a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn. Open doors, windows. Raise walls and demolish them.

Luiselli probes the gaps between author and author-character, creating a writer and her written self that both are and are not the same voice. She punches holes in the paper-thing walls of reality to plaster them up with fiction much like Elizabeth Hardwick does in Sleepless Nights, except building multiple layers as author-characters create their further author-characters. She teases the assumption of a reader that the author would share similar experiences and ideals as their character, with the woman always having to remind her husband that what she is creating is actually fiction. Or is it? ‘My husband reads some of this and asks who Moby is. Nobody I say. Moby is a character…But Moby exists. Or perhaps not.’

Troubled by the gripes from her husband being unable to separate biography from fiction when he reads her manuscript, she decides to bury herself further into fiction and begins to write a novel about Owen, creating ‘a novel that has to be told from the outside in order to be read from within.’ As Owen’s story takes shape, the woman becomes less and less of a presence while Owen himself ages and thins towards physical oblivion.

In One Thousand and One Nights the narrator strings together a series of tales to put off the day of her death. Perhaps a similar but reverse mechanism would work for this story, this death. The narrator discovers that while she is stringing the tale, the mesh of her immediate reality wears thin and breaks. The fiber of fiction begins to modify reality and not vice versa as it should be. Neither of the two can be sacrificed. The only way to save all the planes of the story is to close one curtain and open another...change the characters’ names, remember that everything is or should be fiction. Write what really did happen and what did not.

Owen’s story is representative of the woman’s existence, or is it that the woman is representative of Owen’s? Pushing the metafiction into incredible realms of abstraction, Owen decides to write a story about the woman he sees reading his book of poetry, Obras on the subway, the book the woman is reading during the period where she keeps thinking she sees flashes of Owen’s face in the subway. The two become like ghosts haunting one another.

A wonderful aspect of Faces is Luiselli’s nods to the works that inspired and function within the novel at hand. The characters visions of one another in the subway across time ('you can remember the future too') recalls a poem by Ezra Pound written when he thought he saw a fallen friend in the subway: ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd / petals on a wet, black bough.’. Pound is an inspiration to the characters within the novel, and Owen wonders if he has seen him too on the subway. Early on in the book the author-character recalls a passage from Saul Bellow where he states ‘the living look from the center outward, the dead from some periphery to some sort of center.’ Luiselli hints towards the mechanics of her own novel that features two characters dissolving towards a ghost-like state while looking ‘inward’ through their fiction towards one another. Metafictional examinations of the novel bloom all across the garden of her prose, ideas working both as the outward expression of ideas and also the roots that give the novel life. For example, the staccato structure of the short paragraphs skipping through time being both a reflection of the woman having to write in quick doses under the necessity of constant attention to her children and the author-character writing a novel solely from the post-its on which she took brief notes of Owen’s life.

‘All novels lack something or someone. In this novel there’s no one. No one except a ghost I used to see sometimes in the subway.’

While the English translation of the novel bears an apt title for the book considering all the subway visions found within, I tend to prefer the title in it’s original— ‘The Weightless’; this is a novel about losing oneself in the efforts of creating fiction, about giving way to the heavy weightlessness of words, to become the author-character instead of simply ‘the author’. Ghosts play a large role in the novel, and the ‘ghost’ of each character haunts the other layers of the novel much like how the reality of an author haunts the pages of the characters they create. ‘You are not an utterance,’ Owen is reminded by a wise friend when he questions his state as a verb tense, desiring to be the immortality of words instead of the failing flesh.

Perhaps it’s right that words contain nothing, or almost nothing. That their content is, at the very least, variable.

The characters are drawn towards the realm of words, of putting their souls into fiction and poetry, and we watch them withdraw from the pages as they do so. The allusion to Pedro Páramo opens the gates of interpretation to Luiselli’s literary vision of ‘ghosts’ that these characters seem to become, but, thankfully, she leaves much open to such interpretation. This is a novel that leaves threads hanging to tie to theory, a novel built of ideas and not concrete facts, the sort of literature that opens itself to discussion and advancement instead of a tidy closed casket.

There are people who are capable of recounting their lives as a sequence of events that lead to a destiny. If you give them a pen, they write you a horribly boring novel in which each line is there for a reason…

This is a novel about the possibilities of literature, the pathway from past to present, building on the headway of literary tradition and pressing it boldly forward to unknown futures. Luiselli does not tie up loose ends out of laziness or incompetence, but out of respect to the reader and respect to the futures of fiction.

Valeria Luiselli is a name to watch for. Published when the author was a mere 28 years old in 2011, and brought to an english translation only three years later published by Coffee House Press alongside her collection of essays, Sidewalks, Luiselli delivers an early promise of literary greatness. Spanning a century and peopled with new and familiar faces, this novel is something special and deserving of the following that has been slowly building. Faces in the Crowd explores the metafictional worlds of literature and the poetic gaps between author and character and presents them in a fresh and fascinating manner. This is a novel of ghosts echoing the lessons of days past to those in the present present and the voice of Luiselli is one I hope to have haunting us all for years to come.
5/5

'By now it's an elaborate lie, repeated to myself so often that it's come to form part of my repertory of events, indistinguishable from any other memory.'